News 

The European Commission is warning of the need to harmonise rules and regulations for mobile television before 2012 when sufficient radio spectrum will become available, reports Reuters.

According to the news agency, the prolific EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding - speaking at CeBIT - said that important decisions should be taken in the next year.

It quotes her as saying: 'We had better make sure that we create enough space for these services to take off. In particular, we have to make sure that harmonised spectrum is available across Europe, so that consumers can access services on their travels: this is the European freedom to move.'

Talk of harmony, however, doesn't reflect the current jostling for precedence

ADVERTISEMENT

among the emerging mobile TV standards. While Virgin has launched a DAB (digital audio broadcasting)-based initiative (via the BT Movio service), for example, BT and O2 began trials in Oxford last year using DVB-H broadcast. This transmission standard for handheld devices is specially designed for low power consumption and robust reception (see also Industry giants combine to promote DVB-H).

Other standards include the DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) already launched in Korea and the TDtv format announced in January, which allows an unlimited number of subscribers to use the same network bandwidth. Such standards, involving the use of the 3G spectrum, have obviously drawn the attention of Reding.

'I am more and more convinced that we cannot wait until 2012 to deploy new services such as mobile TV on a large scale,' she said. 'We cannot afford to sleep on this. Actions are already well underway outside Europe. That is why we should act now to allocate at least some common European spectrum bandwidths for Mobile TV.'