COMMENTARY: Mobile TV is the next regulatory battlefront

THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY AND broadcasters look to be readying themselves for a regulatory scuffle over the delivery of television to mobile phone handsets. The wireless companies say that since the video signal they plan to make available to cell phone customers is delivered via IP, (over the Internet), that it therefore falls under the CRTC’s 1999 new media exemption order and should not be subject to regulation. Period. That order said the CRTC would stay out of regulating the Internet – a decision which was made when the web was still just a toddler, however.The broadcasters say that television is...