Mobile TV is not happening in Europe and will not happen until it is a free service for the user.

Mobile phone operators in Japan and China have been smart enough to realise that mobile TV must be a free-to-air service just like terrestrial TV.

In Europe, operators have failed to see this. They are set on charging a premium for TV services on mobile phones and as a result you’d be hard-pressed to find a TV-enabled handset in the UK.

This would be very bad news for the semiconductor companies relying on mobile TV to drive the next wireless business boom, if it were not for fast growing mobile TV markets in Japan, China and Korea.

Over 25 million TV-enable handsets were sold in Japan last year, and take-up of the free TV services is growing. In December, half of all mobiles shipped in Japan were TV-enabled.

Last month, Ofcom may have sold 40MHz of radio spectrum to Qualcomm for a mobile TV trial based on its MediaFlo technology. But in Japan and Korea the governments went further and actually mandated that mobile operators had to support free-to-air TV services.

So while the rest of the world gets to grips with the real issue about mobile TV, that is its cost to the user, the Europeans have got all hung up about technology standards.

Europe looks like becoming a test lab for various forms of mobile TV technology and as a result will be slow to tackle the commercial issues.

Bureaucrats at the EU seem to have lost touch with the commercial issues. Last year, the EU loudly heralded their championing of DVB-H as "the single European standard" as the trigger for mobile TV services in Europe.

The reality is that the mobile industry itself viewed the EU’s DVB-H decision largely as an irrelevance.

Technology is not the issue here. The market will choose the technology it sees as most appropriate.

The problem is that, unlike Japan, China and Korea, Europe does not yet have the infrastructure and a mobile TV market to speak of. And most worryingly, as long as operators see it as a way of clawing back more of that 3G licence money, Europe does not look like getting a mobile TV market anytime soon.