MOBILE TELECOMS: LIVE TELEVISION ON MOBILE PHONES IN EUROPE IN 2006.

"Tests launched in France, Finland, Germany, Great Britain and Italy will soon be completed with the Italians likely to lead the way in launching commercial services", according to Peter MacAvock, Executive Director of Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), the consortium of 270 telephony, computer and television companies behind this new technology.

DVB, present for some 10 years on the digital television market with its own standard, DVB-T (Terrestrial), which has emerged as the sector's reference standard, began looking at telephony in 2002, finally developing a "mobile" version of its standard, DVB-H (Handheld), which it also expects to emerge as the leader on its market. A sign of its success, more than 30 stands were devoted to it at the 3GSM Mobile Telephony Congress in Barcelona, from Thales, offering live images from the Olympic Games in Turin, to the News Channel EuroNews, which has announced the launch of mobile broadcasts in a ninth country, Spain.

Though this service is already possible on 3G telephones, Gerard Pousset, Marketing Director of DIBcom, a French company specialising in the manufacture of chips for receiving television transmissions in cars, on PCs and via mobile phones, warns that "once there are a large number of users, the network is likely to be saturated". He explains that "two problems must be solved in order to adapt television broadcasting for mobile telephones: battery life and the need to avoid over-sized aerials".

Technical difficulties overcome, large-scale testing of DVB-H began in 2005 in several European countries: "This enabled us to gauge how much he uses are prepared to pay for this service and which subjects are...

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