Before it’s even really gotten out of the starting gates, mobile TV could become the next battleground in the struggle between telcos and broadcasters to dominate the digital content arena in Europe. Today, Bertrand Meheut, the head of Vivendi’s television unit Canal+, said that broadcasters, and not mobile operators, should be the ones financing and distributing mobile TV.

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The argument is, of course, a financial one: Vivendi would like to see more of the profits from mobile TV going to the broadcasters rather than mobile operators. According to the French financial daily Les Echos, Meheut is trying to get other broadcasters to team up with Canal+ to follow a model that would reduce distribution costs to 3 million euros ($4.1 million) per year per channel, with a third of the population able to use the services initially.

Meheut: “If mobile phone operators pay for the network, they will demand in exchange a substantial part of the payment made by the customer. Certain TV channels are susceptible to the siren calls of the mobile phone operators because they don’t want to pay, but they should be well aware of the risks.” (Les Echos story via AFX/Forbes.)

It’s not a big surprise that the comments have come from the Canal+ camp. The pay-TV broadcaster has a track record of investing in other interactive services that have taken basic TV beyond its one-directional, one-to-many heritage. Among these was a texting application that let viewers chat to each other alongside programmes on Canal+ channels, and a mobile TV trial in France, running over DVB-H, concluded last year, where Canal+ provided all the content aggregation and ran the platform (SFR provided a return channel for interactivity, and the e-commerce platform for any related transactions).

Meheut’s remarks come at a key time for the nascent European mobile TV industry. Most of the mobile TV initiatives that have been launched so far in Europe have been spearheaded by mobile operators, but there have also been a handful of projects led by broadcasters. Last month, one of the these, a German DMB-based service from MFD, said it wanted to team up with another media company, Neva, to build out a DVB-H network. (It may turn out that other DMB projects will have to rethink their technology, since EU media commissioner Viviane Reding has effectively said the EU would mandate mobile TV rollouts using a single standard, DVB-H.)

Still, the state of affairs in Europe differs quite a bit from a more established mobile TV market: Korea. There, the majority mobile TV services are run by broadcasters rather than mobile operators (and in fact the operator-led service, which runs for a fee, has not had as good takeup as the free services from broadcasters). None of the services seem to be making much in the way of profits, though, and the whole project has received a lot of backing from the Korean government from that very start.