China to Launch Domestic Mobile TV Standard

October 26, 2006 - source: BWCS

Surprising no-one, the Chinese broadcast authorities have this week insisted that the country will launch its own technology standard for mobile TV. As with the "Chinese-only" 3G mobile phone technology, the regulators seem willing to allow foreign mobile TV standards to compete with the home-grown one. However, the existence of a new Chinese only format is expected to add spice to the existing competition for dominance in this new market.

Major mobile equipment and handset vendors have already poured millions of research and development dollars into mobile TV standards across the world, as they struggle to find the best technology and business models for delivering TV and video to mobile handsets.

The importance of China in this fledgling market could be huge. Not only is it home to the world's largest, and one of the fastest-growing, mobile customer base, it is widely assumed that mobile TV will prove enormously popular in China. The predicted popularity of such services in the People's Republic is based on the current lack of pay-TV subscribers and the fact that mobile services have been taken up very quickly by the country's newcomers to mobile phones.

So far, it is known that the powerful Shanghai Media Group has been trialing advertising supported video services on mobile phones in China. However, some analysts believe that China is more likely to take the Korean route, which involves satellite and terrestrial versions of a Samsung Electronics-backed system called Digital Media Broadcasting. By March 2006 over 500,000 mobile phones in Korea were capable of receiving this service.

Meanwhile the Nokia-backed DVB-H standard is taking on Qualcomm's MediaFLO system for the mantle of most-favoured mobile TV technology. Now, it seems, they will have another opponent to scrap with in China.