The fact that China announced yesterday that it is developing its own mobile TV standard in face of competition from at least 4-5 other standards have some companies in the industry worried, but regulators didn’t suggest the domestic standard would be the only one allowed in China when they announced it yesterday.
Even then, the existence of a Chinese standard could ratchet up competition between companies in the scramble to develop a dominant global standard for mobile TV, writes WSJ. Nokia and Samsung Electronics, for example, have already invested heavily in deploying mobile-TV services in other parts of the world.
The planned Chinese standard, which bears the ungainly name GY/T220.1-2006, could help local telecom providers, such as China Mobile Ltd. and China Netcom Ltd., by reducing the amount of money they have to pay in royalty and intellectual-property fees to foreign companies, according to Sandy Shen, a telecom analyst with Gartner in Shanghai.