MobaHO!

» see mobaho.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

MobaHO! was Japan-only at the hardware layer, which is the cleanest kind of unavailable. You could not sideload it or sign up from abroad. To receive it you needed a Japanese receiver with a Japanese subscription, and the best of those receivers was a DoCoMo handset called Music Porter X that was never sold anywhere else. That makes this a product I can read the engineering of and never had a route to.

The service began broadcasting on 20 October 2004 from MBSat 1, a satellite also called Hanbyul that had gone up on an Atlas IIIA the previous March. It was a joint venture: Mobile Broadcasting Corporation on the Japanese side, SK Telecom on the Korean side, with the same spacecraft carrying a separate beam for Korea's own S-DMB service. Impress reported at launch that the thing worked on the Shinkansen and on the expressway, which was the actual selling point: satellite radio for cars already existed, but television you could watch at 300 km/h did not.

Technically it was modest and careful. ISDB carrying MPEG-4 Simple Profile video at 320x240 and fifteen frames a second, with the whole transport stream scrambled using MULTI2 for conditional access. Transmission went out over S-band at 2.6 GHz from 144 degrees east with omnidirectional antennas in mind, and a separate Ku-band transponder fed repeaters meant for subway stations and anywhere the satellite beam could not reach.

MBCO expected a million subscribers by 2008. It reached roughly a hundred thousand. Operations ceased on 31 March 2009, with the final broadcast ending at three in the afternoon.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the hardware ~

Toshiba and Sharp both built portable receivers with QVGA screens in them, and there was a PC card for laptops. The card is the interesting one: it was the only device that could record a broadcast, and the recording was encrypted against the card's own hardware, so playback required the exact card that made it. Lose the card and the archive you built with it became noise.

~ what beat it ~

ITmedia's July 2008 headline said it plainly: MobaHO! ends at the end of March, defeated by 1seg. 1seg was the one-segment slice of Japan's terrestrial digital broadcast, free to receive, and by the mid-2000s Japanese carriers were putting the tuner into ordinary phones as a checkbox feature. A viewer comparing the two saw a subscription plus a dedicated receiver on one side and a tuner already in their pocket on the other.

MobaHO! had the better library on paper. Thirty-odd mostly music channels plus seven or eight video channels, much of it produced in-house for the Japanese and Korean markets, with American west coast FM stations carried for English-language pop and rock. Toward the end it even carried WQXR from New York. The licensed bandwidth was comparable to what Sirius and XM each had in the United States, and it still lost to a tuner that cost the subscriber nothing.

~ where the satellite went ~

The spacecraft outlived the service by a wide margin. After MBCO folded, MBSat 1 was sold to Asia Broadcasting Satellite in 2013, moved to 75 degrees east, and renamed ABS 2i. It was later renamed again, to ABS 4, marketed as Mobisat. A satellite is an asset with a resale market. A subscriber base of a hundred thousand Japanese commuters is not.

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