Europe Seizes Lead In On-The-Go TV

Europe’s homegrown specification for mobile digital video broadcast, DVB-H (for “handheld”), is already in field trials, and commercial services are scheduled to go live in 2005.

Most carriers and industry analysts in the United States remain dubious about mobile TV, and openly wonder if anyone would watch. Europeans think otherwise. Rather than add only an existing analog or digital TV tuner to mobile handsets, they are creating a converged platform built on a 2.5G/3G cellular network and a digital terrestrial TV broadcast infrastructure. Europe, which led the world mobile-communication revolution with the GSM standard, believes it has now devised a winning formula for the next stage by marrying DVB-H with Internet Protocol (IP) datacasting.

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