Europe’s digital TV standards body, DVB, has formally unveiled its new ‘T2 Lite’ profile, designed to provide a subset of the full DVB-T2 specification which is optimised for mobiles and handheld devices.

DVB is hoping it will succeed where the first-generation mobile broadcast standard DVB-H failed, in part because – in the words of chairman Phil Laven – “mobile operators are going to have a serious problem of congestion on their networks” if video consumption on mobile devices continues to increase at current rates.

But Laven also pointed out that the new stripped-down, rugged profile allows the technology to be easily tested in the marketplace, because it can be integrated into a DVB-T2 multiplex without the need to build a dedicated network. This potentially makes its use more cost-effective than DVB-H.

BBC R&D experiments have shown that using a DVB-T2 multiplex normally carrying 40.2MBit/s (as in the UK Freeview HD profile), a T2 Lite channel could be squeezed into a 1.02MBit/s stream, with the DVB-T2 channels taking up the remaining 33.6MBit/s (the loss of 5-6 MBit/s is explained by the extra capacity devoted to making T2 Lite more robust).

Peter Siebert, DVB’s project director, promised that “very soon, all [DVB-] T2 chipsets will support T2 Lite.”