To benefit from the momentum offered by the European football tournament in June and by the Olympic Games in August, the Commission will "in a few weeks' time" issue a range of best practices adopted in the EU states to "lightly" regulate mobile television - a service primarily seen as most appropriate for coverage of sport events.
Brussels invokes a "light-touch regulatory environment" which should avoid imposing excessive obligations to a service which is still "nascent", although it expected to have a bright future. Consulting firm McKinsey reckons that mobile TV could have more than 190 million users across Europe by 2015, with a total value of 24 billion euros.
The Commission's plans also foresee the reservation of part of the UHF spectrum for pan-European mobile services to enable a customer of an Austrian or Italian operator to watch TV on his handset when he is in Germany or France.
The telecoms industry agrees with the idea of reserving UHF bands to mobile services, but does not consider it necessary to have exactly the same frequencies across different member states.
They consider roaming for mobile TV more suitable, even if leaves open the issue of cross-border copyright of the use of content. Indeed, agreements among EU national operators are considered feasible since they are already in place for phone calls. But so far there are only a few examples of the protection of property rights for content transmitted across borders in Europe, which could pose a problem in the eyes of telecoms operators.
What seems certain at present is that in future mobile TV - currently only a reality in Italy, Finland and partially Germany and the UK, will be transmitted on handsets able to offer both free-to-air and on-demand services with broadcast and unicast technologies, such as DVB-H and 3G respectively.
