The Finnish public broadcaster YLE has said it will postpone the launch of its mobile TV services until at least the end of the year.
The reasons cited for its decision are a combination of copyright issues and the limited number of handsets in the market capable of handling DVB-H technology.
Copyright organisations are insisting that separate payments are made by the broadcasters for programmes carried over a mobile TV network, even if the transmission is a simulcast of an established channel.
Although the Finnish Ministry of Education has been looking into the copyright issue, it has not yet reached a conclusion, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, YLE’s director of television, said that no conclusions on the ministry’s work should be drawn from YLE’s decision to delay.
The commercial broadcasters MTV3 and Nelonen Channel 4 have also chosen to sit it out until a clear view on the question of copyright has been reached. MTV3 had already made it clear that it would not launch until the copyright issue had been resolved.
The irony is that Finland was an early mover in the allocation of permanent spectrum for mobile TV services. The transmission company Digita established Finland’s first mobile TV network last December, and it is currently available in central Helsinki, Turku and Oulu.
The mobile phone operators Elisa, DNA and TeleSonera are also preparing to launch mobile TV services over the next 12 months. However, it goes without saying that there will be no launch without the content, particularly Finland’s big media brands.
