China is beginning to try and sort out the mess that is its mobile TV standards, with the China National Standardization Administration (CNSA), in association with the National Development & Reform Commission, the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the State Administration of Radio, Film & Television (SARFT), and a number Chinese enterprises banding together to assess and formulate a national standard for mobile TV. The problem is that China has 5 home-grown standards—the DMB-TH standard from Tsinghua University, the T-MMB standard from Beijing Coastline, the CMB standard from Huawei Technologies, the CMMB standard from SARFT, and the CDMB standard from the China Radio Standardization Association—which doesn’t include all the other mobile TV standards from around the globe. Each organization is pushing its own standards and the Chinese government wants to find some common ground, but if this TechOn article is right it’s not going to be easy… “However, due to the lack of a common standard, manufacturers are reluctant to start production, which has delayed the development of mobile TV in China. With the approach of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the need to finalize the mobile TV standard as soon as possible is now pressing.”

China is a big market and can probably sustain a number of different standards in the marketplace—but not quite as many as it has got. Likewise, market forces would probably see one or two standards succeed over time (even in China) but the government probably wants to export the technology, and for that to happen it needs to get in production quickly.