European Commission opens Europe's Single Market for Mobile TV services

This week the European Commission has adopted a strategy favoring the take-up of mobile TV across the 27 EU Member States. The Commission urges Member States and industry to facilitate and accelerate the deployment of mobile TV across Europe and to encourage the use of DVB-H as the single European standard for mobile TV. Until now, the introduction and take-up of mobile TV in the EU has been slow while Europe's competitors have progressed significantly. Unless Europe takes concrete action immediately, it risks losing its competitive edge. For example, the mobile TV penetration rate of South Korea, Asia's most developed mobile TV market, is close to 10%. Yet penetration in Italy, the EU's most advanced market, is still less than 1%. The Commission is strongly committed to the success of mobile TV which could be a market of up to €20 billion by 2011, reaching some 500 million customers worldwide. The Commission sees today's Communication on Strengthening the Internal Market for Mobile TV as crucial to create jobs and business opportunities for content creators, service providers and hardware manufacturers, and to bring new value-added services to citizens. Three key success factors have been identified by the EC for mobile TV take-up:

Standards/interoperability: The Commission will promote consensus around a common standard, to reduce market fragmentation caused by multiple technical options for mobile TV transmission. The universal success of the GSM standard – which had been strongly supported by the Commission and Member States at the end of the 1980s – proves the benefit of a common standard.

Spectrum: Today's Communication outlines the need of an EU strategy for the "digital dividend", the premium spectrum that will be freed up by the switch-off from traditional analogue to digital TV broadcasting. The Commission calls upon Member States to make spectrum available for mobile broadcasting as quickly as possible, including in the UHF band (470-862 MHz) as it becomes available. The Commission has also initiated the opening to mobile TV services of another frequency band, the so-called L-band (1452-1492 MHz) as a fallback solution.

A favorable regulatory environment: National approaches to regulating mobile TV vary considerably at the moment. This generates regulatory uncertainty across the EU. The Commission considers that mobile TV is a nascent service and as such should benefit from "light touch" regulation. It will organize an exchange of best practice and provide guidance for a coherent framework for mobile TV authorization regimes.

Source: European Commission.

More information at:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=3535

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