Portfolio Company Spotlight: Axel Technologies
Mobile TV has been waiting for the commercial lift off in Europe for sometime now, unlike in Asia, where it is has been available for years. The development of mobile TV in Europe has been caught in the standards debate when the main focus should have been on the availability of spectrum, flexible infrastructure, user experience and the content issues. While the authorities work on their plans for the spectrum availability across the continent, operators and device manufactures are looking for the best business models to make the mobile TV market a success.
The Finnish Mobile TV software vendor, Axel Technologies, strongly believes that the successful long-term solution for mobile TV is a multistandard - multidevice marketplace where the focus is on the end-user. The end-users do not care about the technology behind the solution. What they are interested in is the user experience. This amounts to interesting content, variety of devices available, pricing, usability and maturity of the technology. With multistandard solutions, device manufactures can produce global products rather than locally specified solutions with limited volumes. This enables them to produce a good variety of handsets to meet the requirements of different vendors and markets. Operators can adjust their services to local standards and the end-users will be able to use any device of their choice and select the right price category to meet their needs.
The expansion of Mobile TV from mobile phones to other handheld devices is natural, as there are an increasing range of non- cellular devices that have been designed for multimedia and entertainment. Axel’s One- For-All solution expands mobile TV from traditional handsets to Mobile Internet Devices (MID), portable media players, netbooks, and car navigators. The multistandard mobile TV solution alongside with the new efficient handheld platforms such as the open Moblin.org, enables new business opportunities for the handheld manufacturers - mobile TV functionality is now significantly easier to add to any new device.
Axel offers one-stop multistandard solutions for device manufacturers, semiconductor suppliers and operators. Their product portfolio includes Axel Mobile TV middleware with DVB IPDC and OMA BCAST support, and multistandard All-In-One Axel mobile TV user interface client. Axel is headquartered in Finland and has a sales support office in Hong Kong. www.axel.fi
