[photopress:mobileuserchina2.jpg,full,alignright]China’s broadcasting industry regulator has announced it will require all mobile phone service providers in China to use a China-developed technology standard for broadcasting television signals to mobile phones.
The State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (SARFT) announced the new standard, STiMi, in advance of an international forum for standards for mobile phone television which began in Beijing on Wednesday.
STiMi, which is somewhat confusing but stands for Satellite Terrestrial Interactive Multi-service Infrastructure, was developed by the SARFT-affiliated Academy of Broadcast Science and will be applied across the country beginning next month.
Major mobile service providers, such as China Mobile and China Unicom, have already set up mobile TV systems of their own and there are probably more than 1.5 million subscribers.
The problem is that converting from the standards currently used to STiMi will not be easy.
The official SARFT official view is that is there are no conflicts of interest between Chinese mobile service providers and SARFT and that the real fight is between the domestic industry and foreign standard makers.
Perhaps. Yet there are already 1.5 million people using the previous standard. Does that mean they will all have to buy new phones or will there be a chageover period?
Meanwhile, in a parallel development, China’s Ministry of Information Industry is calling for the development of a made-in-China standard for inputting Chinese characters for short messages.
The ministry has solicited opinions from dozens of cellular phone producers and related enterprises such as the Motorola, China Mobile and China Unicom on the new standard.
[photopress:mobileuserchina.jpg,full,alignright]Wang Lijian, secretary general of the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee said ninety percent of the Chinese character input standards for mobile phone are copyrighted by foreign companies. This means China pays millions of dollars every year in royalty fees for the use of the input standard.
Statistics show that China has more than 400 million mobile phone users. Some 303 million mobile phones were produced in China in 2005.
Wang Lijian said Chinese companies have developed their own in-put software but they have found it difficult to enter the market because mobile phone producers are often reluctant to change partners.
Gao Jingjian, head of the National Work Group on Standards of Chinese Input Technology said Chinese character input technologies developed by foreign companies are not meeting the demand of Chinese market. Most of foreign companies use the old Chinese character standard issued in 1980, which included only 6,763 Chinese characters. However, the new standard includes more than 27,000 Chinese characters.
Wang Lijian said the new input standard advocated by the Ministry of Information Industry was developed by a company in south China’s Guangdong Province.
The standard has been used by some domestic mobile phone producers such as Konka, Gionee and TCL and end users have responded well to the input technology. He said the ministry is soliciting advice from more enterprises.
Source: Xinhua and China.org