Two into one may not go

The paper discusses how two organizations are competing to set the standard for mobile television in China. The prize at stake is control of an emerging market of handsets that is expected to grow very rapidly ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), which runs the country's broadcasting, announced the China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (CMMB) standard, a satellite-based mobile TV system. However, at the end of 2006, the Standardisation Administration of the People's Republic of China (SAPRC) asked the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to set a national standard for mobile TV, in order to create some competition.