The current quality of mobile TV may not be quite up to snuff in China, but that may not matter to those Chinese consumers hoping to tune into the Olympics. Yun Wiejie, president and chief executive of semiconductor firm Telegent Systems, told Reuters that for certain events like the Olympics, “the most important thing is to learn the result immediately…The quality of the images doesn’t matter sometimes.” That’s the theory anyway, which a lot of equipment makers and mobile content providers investing in the mobile TV business in China are waiting to see whether it pans out. Telegent provides mobile TV chips, which lets phones pick up a TV signal for free. At the end of last year, Yun said the chips were in some 5 million mobiles throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, with China making up half the total.

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The hope in China is that mobile TV viewing will become as popular as it is in Japan and supposedly South Korea (though recent reports have surfaced that while penetration of mobile TV in South Korea is widespread, people weren’t actually turning it on and watching it). Cracking a market as large as China’s would mean a big payoff, of course. The country has 600 million mobile phone users. Research firm CCID Consulting estimates that the two percent—or 12 million—who do subscribe to mobile TV bring in 4.6 billion yuan ($670 million) of revenue a year. They’re estimating very heady growth of 10 times that figure by 2012.

So far in China, mobile TV has supposedly been held back by poor bandwidth and the lack of anything decent to watch. The infrastructure side of things are supposedly changing. China Mobile has turned on its 3G network in time for the games, and has snapped up some 40,000 mobile TV-enabled phones that are being passed out to staff at guests. The plan had been to hand out the phones after the Olympics, but the operator, which uses the homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G standard, deemed that its high speed services, including mobile TV, were good enough. No word yet on how these phones are performing—anyone have one at the Games care to comment?