ATSC license fees released

The licensing fee for ATSC receivers will be US$5 per unit. Up to now it has been impossible to know what license fees would be payable by manufacturers to the holders of essential technology patents in the ATSC system. This has been in contrast to situation for DVB-T where a patent pool has been in existence for some years now, with the maximum cost per receiver set at around $1 ( i.e. a maximum of 0.75 EUR).

This could all be very significant for Latin America, where the costs of receivers, and specifically set-top boxes, will be a crucial factor. When we talk about a STB costing in or around $30-$50, the difference between $5 per box and $1 per box in licensing fees becomes quite significant.

http://www.mpegla.com/atsc/atsc-agreement.cfm

First DVB-T adoption in Latin America...

I spotted on the newswires this morning that the Uruguayan president has signed a decree that adopts DVB-T and DVB-H for terrestrial DTV in that country. This is rather significant because Latin America, a potentially huge market for DTT, is still something of a virgin territory. The Brazilians have (rather bizarrely) thrown their lot in with the Japanese by deciding to implement a local variation of the ISDB-T system. None of the other countries, however, have yet made a decision on which DTT standard to use. The Americans have been pushing ATSC in the region of course, but it's a system that's seen as being not as technologically advanced as either DVB-T or ISDB-T....

It'll be interesting to see whether this decision in Uruguay pushes the issue up the agenda in Argentina and Chile, which will probably be the next countries to make decisions. Should one or other of those opt also for DVB-T, it's fair to say that the system could spread to the rest of Latin America. Which will mean more good news for receiver prices.