South Korea is leading the broadcast mobile-TV assault with a homegrown system, which may also be used to broadcast coverage of related events to fans attending the World Cup soccer games in Germany next year [see photo, "Over The Air"].

The mobile-phone industry views the upcoming soccer tournament in Germany as a great opportunity to showcase broadcast technology, because of its ability to beam live coverage to anyone with a specially equipped cellphone who's near a suitably equipped television tower.

Over the past few years, South Korea's state-funded Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, in Taejeon-Kwangyeokshi, has spent US $40 million developing the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) standard, based on Europe's Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard. In March, Seoul awarded DMB licenses to six broadcasters. The country's two major handset manufacturers, LG Electronics Inc. and rival Samsung Electronics Co., both in Seoul, already offer DMB-based phones.

Europeans, meanwhile, are developing two alternative broadcast mobile TV standards. The more advanced of the two is Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H), which was approved last year by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in Sophia Antipolis, France, and is currently being tested across Europe. The standard supports rates of up to 25 frames per second, compared with earlier formats of between 1 and 5 fps, according to Jouni Kamarainen, director of rich media technology at Nokia Corp., in Espoo, Finland. To prolong battery life, the standard temporarily shuts off tuner chips between broadcast bursts, using a "time slicing" technique.

Europe is also working on its version of the DMB standard, partly because of frequency-availability considerations. The key difference between the South Korean and European standards is the way the video signal is transported. "The South Koreans have taken a quick and dirty approach," says Thomas Wachter, director of digital broadcasting technology at Deutsche Telekom AG's IT services unit, T-Systems International GmbH, in Frankfurt, Germany, while the Europeans treat the video more elegantly, as an Internet Protocol data stream.

By the look of things, South Korea could have the edge. At CeBit 2005 in Hannover, Samsung teamed with T-Systems to demonstrate the DMB standard. The two companies have since signed an agreement to collaborate in the further development and deployment of the technology. "The South Korean system works, and handsets are available," says Wachter. "It's still unclear when the European [broadcast] systems will be commercially available."

Stay tuned.