Several new mobile TV broadcasting standard, most prominently DVB-H, have been tailored for battery-powered handheld devices. Nokia bankrolled the emerging DVB-H standard.

The European Commissioner for Telecommunications has also weighed in, earlier this year pushing through legislation that mandated DVB-H as the continent's official standard for digital mobile television service.

More important, the very idea of mobile TV struck many consumers as a no-brainer. Everyone knows how to watch TV.

But despite all of DVB-H's inherent advantages, the mobile industry in Europe is now going back to the drawing board, engaged once more in the "DVB-T vs. DVB-H" debate.

Pundits are now saying that Germany, once DVB-H's resting ground is pass. Now, the survival of the DVB-H mobile TV standard is up to the fickle French.

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Since a mobile TV fiasco that played out earlier this year in Germany, the entire industry has begun entertaining doubts that the mobile industry will ever need DVB-H.

German mobile operators -- Vodafone, T-Mobile and O2 who banded together and applied for a nationwide DVB-H license but failed in Jan., 2008 -- launched last May a DVB-T mobile handset capable of receiving free-to-air digital terrestrial television broadcasts.

This end-run by the German operators was a turning point. This move "entirely bypassed the mobile broadcast value chain," and has drawn the attention of other European mobile operators "which haven't been able to deploy mobile broadcast TV services because of a lack of spectrum, incapacity to obtain a licence, or mobile TV business case skepticism," observed Ronan de Renesse, senior analyst at Screen Digest.