Mobile phones
Downloading musical clips, capturing short video sequences using the built-in camera and exchanging them via MMS, playing of a few minutes long video clips from SD cards/memory sticks or the internal memory, accessing to Internet, and video streaming are all services currently accessible to the user.

Mobile phone networks
But while networks such as GPRS or UMTS support video offerings on mobiles, they were designed for interpersonal communications and are not consequently very suitable for broadcasting contents towards a large number of terminals.

Television to mobiles
Taking advantage of the experience of the deployment of the digital broadcasting networks, technologies specifically adapted to broadcasting to mobiles have been developed.In Europe, the DVB-H solution has been adopted because of its similarities with DVB-T, from which it originates, and also on account of its performance. This choice approved by the European Commission was also supported by the majority of manufacturers, mobile operators, audiovisual editors and broadcast network operators.

DVB-H
The Digital Video Broadcasting project involves more than 200 companies from 25 countries across the world. Its members are manufacturers, broadcasters and all parties involved in the development of digital television. It takes the form of broadcasting standards for several media: DVB-S for satellite, DVB-C for cable, DVB-T for terrestrial digital broadcasting (TNT), DVB-H for broadcasting to mobiles and DVB-SH for broadcasting via satellites to mobiles. The family of DVB systems has been designed to share as many elements as possible, so as to minimise equipment costs.

On 17 March 2008, the DVB-H standardised by the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) was adopted by the European Commission as the official standard for mobile television.

How does it work?
This standard is an extension of the DVB-T standard, defined for Terrestrial Digital Television. It stands out through the introduction of two mechanisms which improves the performances of broadcasting of digital TV and radio programmes to pocket terminals powered by batteries and equipped with small aerials (PDAs, smart phones, personal video receivers). The first mechanism is designed to reduce the mobile terminal consumption while receiving a TV programme. Known as "time slicing", it consists of transmitting the multimedia flow in successive bursts of a limited duration, separated by several hundreds of milliseconds. As a result, the receiver's energy is saved during the periods of time when the selected programme is not transmitted.

The second mechanism, named MPE-FEC, is a reinforced error correction process tailored to mobiles with a single built-in aerial