Now it’s even more official. Yesterday, we alerted our readers about the imminent announcement of a single mobile TV standard by the European Union, and as expected it is DVB-H. The European Commission is banking on its past success with GSM (it pushed for the standard in the 1990s).

As EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding puts it: “Europe is today at a crossroads We can either take the lead globally — as we did for mobile telephony based on the GSM standard developed by the European industry — or allow other regions to take the lion’s share of the promising mobile TV market. Wait-and-see is not an option.”

Possible hitches of a DVB-H Europe is the language barrier, carrier-specific DRM and frequency allocation.

Mobile TV’s largest customer in Europe is Italy with half a million viewers. Research shows a $20 billion mobile industry in 2015.

[via iht]