Local TV Broadcasts Coming Soon to Hand-helds

This item combines two of my favorite topics, cellphones and digital TV. The two will merge sooner now that two South Korean companies have buried the hatchet and will merge their competing standards, opening the way for broadcasters to send their signals to cellphones and other mobile devices.

It's a potentially huge market. This is not the few preselected cable channels that are now offered on AT&T and Verizon phones. This would be local TV stations that you could carry in your pocket or watch in your car. And these would be the crystal-clear signals of digital broadcast, one benefit of the switchover from analog broadcasts.

LG and Samsung agreed to combine their competing standards for the new technology. That should make a final standard easier to achieve. Some equipment manufacturers won't even wait for the final standard and will start selling broadcasting gear in the coming months.

The two electronics giants apparently learned from the mistakes of their Japanese brethren, who helped stall sales of high-definition video disks with a long-running format war.