DVB-H is Official in Europe

It's official, all right: the European Commission today endorsed - no, not the next David Beckham - but the new mobile TV standard: Nokia's DVB-H.

It was a widely expected move, since the European Union already made a pre-announcement that it would be backing the standard.

Honestly, it's not that hard to see why: Nokia, DVB-H's main backer, is the only European company of the mobile TV bunch of bedfellows that included Qualcomm's MediaFLO and South Korea's T-DMB. Qualcomm's an American company.

While Europe has to abide by a single standard, it's just not that way in the USA. MediaFLO has an iron grip on the nation, mostly due to agreements between Qualcomm and Verizon, and soon AT&T.

DVB-H in the States is so far only present in a trial run somewhere around the New York City area, by a company called Modeo. Unfortunately, there's a serious lack of DVB-H handsets here, because 1) Nokia makes most of them, and 2) it's rather pointless to sell DVB-H phones to a country that won't be using them a whole lot. Seriously, the company has enough problems bringing in normal GSM phones (Nokia is only the fourth largest phone manufacturer in the USA) so DVB-H is just out in right field.