Microtune Announces Plans for Mobile Microtuner

Microtune President and CEO James A. Fontaine, said the company plans to expand its existing line of ATSC, DVB-T and DVB-H based products to develop universal tuners. Plans are to engineer a family of miniature single chip tuners capable of supporting multiple mobile TV standards, and compact dual-tuner configurations for diversity reception and personal video recorder applications. The first part of this strategy will expand the Mobile MicroTuner product family for DVB-T, DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T and DMB-TH applications.

Fontaine said, "Leveraging our patented MicroTuner architecture, coupled with our market leadership in silicon TV tuner chips and digital TV expertise, our product plan is to develop new multistandard, poly-band, universal TV tuners that can help drive the development of the global market for mobile and portable TV."

Fontaine was in Ingolstadt Germany last week for the kick off of commercial mobile TV services and the introduction of handsets using Microtune tuners.

"We expect the commercial rollouts for the 2006 FIFA World Cup to serve as an excellent proving ground for mobile TV services," he said. "We are proud that our DVB-H tuner technology is deployed in the LG Electronics' LG-U900 handsets that will be used in the Italian Hutchison launch."

He added that as additional mobile TV networks are launched internationally, he believes that multiple standards will coexist across regions or countries and that his company would support these multiple standards.