Lack Of Frequency May Cost Europe Mobile TV Lead

Industry leaders and regulators said that Europe is ahead of most countries in launching mobile TV services, but could lose the advantage due to a lack of joint spectrum…which means that handsets sold for Germany will not pick up mobile TV signals in France, and so on. The article goes on to say that it’s not so much the roaming issues that are the problem (since Germans probably don’t want to watch French TV that much anyway) but the fact that different technologies and spectrum will make it difficult to achieve economies of scale in the hardware. Fabio Colasanti, a senior official at the EU executive, said that there are plans to use “L-Band” as a temporary joint frequency, but it will be at least a year before that can be arranged. “DVB-H is an agreed standard for mobile television, but the way content is protected against piracy can differ between DVB-H networks. More than 50 million DVB-H phones are expected to be sold globally by 2010, according to research firm Informa.”

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