French Mobile TV Network Gets $50 Million EU Funding

The European Commission has authorized 37.6 million euro (US$50.9 million) in aid from the French Agence de l’Innovation Industrielle towards funding Television Mobile Sans Limite, a mobile TV research and development project. The project uses the S-Band DVB-H technology (DVB-SH) promoted by Alcatel, and includes 10 other partners: three public research institutes and seven companies active in various business sectors, all of them located in France.

This project will only cover France, and is aimed to be finished in 2009 at a cost of 98.4 million euros (US$133.2 million). The service will, besides usual TV service, also incorporate a “crisis management service which will enable national authorities to alert the population quickly in the event of major disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, pollution incidents and nuclear accidents”. If it’s TV-based it’s not going to reach all handsets, but it does have the benefit over messaging that it would be harder to fake.

European Commission’s reaction to this funding: “The aid’s impact on the competitive functioning of the affected markets should be limited despite the substantial market shares targeted by the project’s participants…The specifications of this new standard (DVB-SH) are accessible to the aid recipients’ competitors. The DVB-SH service will be introduced from 2009 and will operate alongside the mobile television services already on offer, which are meeting initial market demand.”

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