Europe and China is cooperating on a new mobile TV project, dubbed MODIBEC.

The 2-year European Union funded project will focus on digital broadcasting and is intended to promote co-operation between governments, trade bodies and the private sector. As well as supporting development projects, its brief is to promote joint venture business opportunities.

With the Beijing Olympics on the horizon a key aim of MODIBEC will be the convergence of existing mobile digital broadcast systems adopted by the EU and China.

According to WorldDMB (formerly known as the World DAB Forum), the trade body that was formed to promote Eureka 147-based technologies, DAB (digital audio broadcasting) and its family of standards (including DMB, digital multimedia broadcasting) are the only European multimedia broadcasting standard accepted for digital broadcasting by SARFT, China's state broadcasting regulator.

Note that the term digital multimedia broadcasting includes radio, mobile TV and other new media services.

WorldDMB was selected to work with the MODIBEC project as an EU Commission Partner in the MODIBEC project, promoting European digital broadcasting standards in China.

It claims that broadcasters and manufacturers in China consider DAB/DMB the most suitable technology for Digital Radio and Mobile TV because of "its proven technology, variety of receiver devices already in the market and ready access to spectrum".

Some of the partners working with WorldDMB include Motorola, Thomson and Seimens, plus - from the Chinese side - Beijing and Shanghai broadcasters and Chinese manufacturing organisations.

The project has been hailed by WorldDMB. It claims that other digital TV standards, such as DVB-H and Qualcomm's MediaFLO, have not been selected by China's regulators and broadcasters for use within China.