The French connection

Yannick Lévy, CEO and founder of French company DiBcom – producers of mobile television chips ­– spoke with CXO about the challenges of modern day marketing.

Being the founder of a company means wearing a number of different hats, at least in the beginning. That’s certainly the experience of Yannick Lévy, a far-sighted entrepreneur with a background in electrical engineering and digital technology, and the man who started DiBcom back in 2000. The semiconductor company designs high-performance chipsets enabling low-power mobile and portable TV reception everywhere at high speed. Today, analysts suggest that the mobile TV market represents several billion euros worth of revenue for all companies involved in the mobile TV eco-system, from content suppliers to silicon providers.

When DiBcom was first launched, Yannick Lévy was a busy man. “I was doing pretty much everything myself!” He smiles as he continues, “but as I’ve moved on, I’ve been doing a little bit less and delegating more to others. Now, instead, I am doing a bit more of everything! Today I spend a lot of my time working on corporate governance, discussing with the board members and directors, working on the strategy, working on budgets and sometimes raising money. I basically organise how the top management should co-ordinate and implement the company strategy. My final task is to promote DiBcom to customers, the press and the outside world in general.”

DiBcom’s solutions are now used in automotive, PC/peripheral and handheld device applications such as mobile phones (a sector which they entered in 2004). The company has developed several patented algorithms and architectures for fast and accurate channel estimation and high Doppler compensation. Its chipsets are compliant with the current worldwide digital video broadcast standards, such as DVB-T, DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T and DVB-SH. There’s no doubt that today DiBcom dominates the world of digital TV, and yet, the status of household name still eludes the company.

So what are the main product marketing challenges that Lévy faces? “The challenge is to create the market and to make the consumer realise that these products exist. In the history of DiBcom we’ve always created products that enabled new usage mode and it’s not always easy for consumers to realise that a new device is on the market, at least at the beginning of a new market.

“Take for example the iPhone: this device is being promoted with such a huge marketing campaign, from a company that is already a household name. But when you’re addressing something that is not such a star item, people can’t buy it because they don’t even know it exists! Creating critical mass market size before other vendors start to pick up and put those products into retail is, I think, the biggest challenge.”

To address this, DiBcom have tried to increase communication. While it might not always be easy to communicate directly with new consumers, the company has talked a lot with retailers. They have also spoken to current customers about how they could generate more interest; creating conferences on topics and showing products on trade shows. According to Lévy, of course, it is difficult to measure the return immediately, but after a while it becomes visible.

These attempts to communicate DiBcom’s message to the outside world are definitely worthwhile. Digital terrestrial television (DTT) is increasingly the technology of choice for live television broadcasting to mobile devices. Many auto manufacturers have been launching DTT receivers as integrated equipment for a few years. New mobile applications are also developing around television, like portable LCD TVs and laptop PCs with integrated TV. Mobile phones equipped with TV receivers are more available among the smallest and latest mobile digital TV solutions. “In our business, technology is definitely very important,” says Lévy. “It’s what allows us to make products different from others and creates a barrier to entry for our competition. It will be difficult for them to create similar products, and that’s what allows us to get market share and to maintain our position in this sector.”

Chip development time is fairly long, taking a two-year period from the definition of a new product to going to market. “It’s not always easy to respond immediately to customer demand with a new chip; however, there are things we can take into account immediately for the next products. We do this pretty systematically,” explains Lévy. How the company integrates the chip into a system, what software they provide with it, what processes they connect to it: these are ways that DiBcom can be more reactive to customer demand, as these are factors that can be influenced more immediately.

Achievements
All this innovation hasn’t gone unnoticed. DiBcom recently won the French Promising Company National Award in the 2007 Ernest & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards and have been nominated to the European Business Awards. “A prize like that is always a recognition from the industry that you have started to become visible, and that people realise the benefits of your products,” smiles Lévy. “And after I was alone for several years trying to preach that this market was going to come! The fact that we got a prize gives us credit for all these years that we spent alone on the market. At least for the CEO, that’s the main benefit of receiving such recognition!”

Compared to its lonely beginnings, now DiBcom must surely be starting to feel a little hemmed in as more competitors enter what looks to be a lucrative market. And it’s no wonder, when you hear what the experts are saying: “By the end of 2010, mobile TV broadcast subscribers worldwide will have reached 102 million, a giant leap from 3.4 million in 2006,” according to Michelle Abraham, of In-Stat. And while Lévy has seen competitors join his market, he’s optimistic about DiBcom’s enviable position as market leader. “Around the end of 2005 when the subject become quite hyped we saw a bunch of competitors trying to start,” he says brightly. “But for every technology there is this famous hype curve; suddenly people realise that this is a new market with huge potential. That’s when all the competitors start looking into it: big ones, smaller ones and start-ups.”

Lévy names the facts that DiBcom were early on the market and believed in their product much earlier than others as being key to their success. In his words, these provide multiple advantages because you have much more credit with your brand name and more experience on the field, which competitors cannot compete with and – to date – have been unable to surpass.

Given their strong position in the marketplace, future predictions for mobile TV subscribers reaching 102 million in 2010 must bring a smile to Lévy’s already cheery face. “Of course those figures serve to reinforce the huge potential in the market, something we’ve always believed in. It’s such a basic concept – you know, to watch TV on a mobile phone – even a child can understand that. The issue to get there was to put the technology in place, the networks in place, the value chain and so on. This took more time than anyone expected initially, including ourselves. Unfortunately it’s always like that with technology.”

These predictions for the huge future market are good news for the company. But there are other areas that Lévy is hoping to improve too. “When you grow a company there are always all kinds of challenges that come up. Sometimes it’s massive recruitment, sometimes it’s opening up in a new country, sometimes it’s diversifying into other areas. Since the beginning, we’ve always faced these challenges and tried to solve all our problems this way.” It might be difficult to predict exactly what new things DiBcom might face in the years to come, but on the positive side, its CEO is unlikely to ever get bored.

Yannick Lévy received his engineering degree from the Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité, Paris, France, in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, USA, in 1994.

Upon his return to France, he joined the R&D group of Sagem in Paris. Then, he joined Atmel Corporation where he became the manager of a design and marketing team created in Paris by himself and other engineers from Sagem, and produced a complete Digital QAM Receiver Circuit, which was integrated in advanced Cable Set Top Boxes.

After starting Dibcom as a founder in June 2000, Dr. Lévy has been acting as Chief Executive Officer. DiBcom has now become the Worlwide leader in Mobile TV by offering the most advanced solutions for digital TV reception in Cars, Notebooks PCs, MediaPlayers and Handsets. DiBcom has been one of the largest Venture Capital backed companies in Europe.

Digital in Europe

Italy: Italy was the first European country to market mobile TV during the football World Cup in June 2006. This new service launched by 3Italia, enjoyed great consumer success. By the end of August 2006, 3Italia had 150,000 subscribers and announced an objective of 770,000 in September 2007 (10% of their subscriber base). TIM and Vodafone have also launched a DVB-H based service in collaboration with TV broadcaster Mediaset.

France: At the end of 2006, France conducted trials in Paris (including in the metro) which led to general agreement among those in the audiovisual sector, including telephony operators and public authorities, that the launch of mobile TV in France is
imminent. A request for candidates has been launched in November 2007 by regulator CSA, who will determine the TV channels that will be part of the DVB-H launch in 2008.

Germany: Initial DVB-H trials were carried out by four operators (Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2 and E-Plus) in certain regions of Germany during the FIFA 2006 World Cup. Mobile TV is already operational in T-DMB in some areas and will be launched commercially in DVB-H during 2008.

Finland: The DVB-H licence was granted to Digita (a TDF subsidiary). The service was launched commercially at the end of 2007, covering 29% of the population.

Other DVB-H trials are currently under way in Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Albania, Austria and Russia, illustrating Europe’s keen interest and desire for mobile TV.