DVB-T standard as a proven technology for delivery of television to fixed devices can also broadcast to mobile devices but such transmissions are not efficient because it doesn’t consider limited battery life and difficult reception conditions.
That’s why DVB-H was defined and published in 2004 to deliver digital television to handheld devices (mobile phones and PDAs). This standard is based on DVB-T and can share the same multiplex with it. DVB-H also supports data transmissions to handhelds thanks to multiprotocol encapsulation in MPEG-2 streams. Frequency bands assigned to DVB-H broadcasting are VHF, UHF and L (1.452-1.492 GHz). To save power in handhelds this standard uses Time Slicing. DVB-H services are transmitted in bursts and handhelds can go into sleep mode between bursts of selected service (Fig. 8).
In 2013 ETSI published new standard for DVB-NGH (DVB Next Generation Handheld) which updates and replaces DVB-H [10].
In order to deliver digital video, audio and data to handhelds DVB also defined another standard DVB-SH that represents a hybrid satellite/terrestrial system working in S band (around 2.2 GHz). DVB-SH relies on satellites providing coverage of large areas and terrestrial gap fillers covering places without signal from satellites. Satellites can use OFDM or time division multiplex for signal broadcasting. Powerful 3GPP2 Turbocode is used for FEC. Higher layer for DVB-SH (protocols, signaling, etc.) is defined by DVB-IPDC standard.
Trials and deployments of DVB standards for handhelds started from 2007 in many countries (e.g. Finland, India, Italy, US, China, South Africa) but this technology didn’t succeed because of few devices available, lack of business model and new technologies such as 4G/LTE which already offers needed capacity for this kind of service.