Penthera Technologies Inc. at CTIA Wireless today unveiled its Virtual Set Top Box software system for mobile TV broadcast services.
The company also demonstrated its flagship product, Athena-TV, along with technology from Crown Castle Mobile Media, a subsidiary of Crown Castle International; Intel Corp.; and DiBcom, marking the first U.S. public demonstration of mobile TV broadcast reception on multiple platforms.
The live demo featured a continuous flow of TV services beamed from terrestrial transmitters to mobile devices using the DVB-H protocol. DVB-H is expected to become the global standard for mobile television and has been formally adopted by both the DVB Organization and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
Intel provided the client platforms: an Intel Centrino mobile-based laptop and an Intel XScale-based PDA. Crown Castle Mobile Media provided the broadcast network, L-band transmitters, real-time content aggregation and media encoding at its southwestern Pennsylvania network operations center. DiBcom, a fabless semiconductor designer of high-performance chipsets for digital broadcast, provided the DVB-H receiver components.
Penthera's Athena-TV software system provided the user interface, including channel changing capabilities, "grid views" and "detailed views" of upcoming programming. Athena-TV supports a range of operating systems including the Microsoft Windows family; Symbian/S60; Linux, and multiple processing platforms including Intel's XScale and Pentium-M/Centrino.
