Seems like the picture's getting clearer by the minute for paid mobile TV content, and it's a pretty bleak picture indeed. Over in Germany, DVB-H subscriptions are dying a slow, painful death (despite a healthy push by the European Union) thanks to free DVB-T content and a lineup of compatible phones to match, and now, Toshiba is shuttering its four-year-old Moba Ho satellite-based service thanks to the overwhelming availability and popularity of one-seg tuners, which like DVB-T in Germany, offer programming at no charge. Technical advantages, and to a large degree, entertainment value both tend to get overlooked when you've got a free product competing against a paid product -- it's frequently a disruptive economic force that takes profit right out of the equation, and Toshiba's learning that lesson the hard way. Keep your chins up, though, guys; at least you lost this battle for an entirely different reason than you did HD DVD, right? Guess that's not helping much. Anyway, expect the service to vaporize by March of next year, with Toshiba planning to take a one-time hit of $232 million for the shutdown.

In the wake of LG's press conference today we're still a little skeptical that the world needs yet another standard for mobile TV, but for what it's worth, the company appears to have signed up a variety of partners in an effort to push it -- and they certainly brought enough eye candy hardware with prototype MPH hardware already integrated. In the mix was a modified VX9400, an LG laptop, a portable media player, and a USB dongle, and with the first commercial rollouts expected as soon as February of next year, we figure it's a good thing they have so much actual product to show. We're a little miffed at the idea that the standard is robbing sweet, sweet bandwidth from the traditional ATSC signal (as opposed to, say, DVB-H and MediaFLO, which rock their own frequencies), but we can also appreciate why this might speed mobile TV rollouts due to a significantly reduced dedicated infrastructure footprint. And besides, who isn't excited about the prospect of watching the boob tube at 140 miles per hour?

Some... er, most parts of the country are waiting on any flavor of that bandwidth-thirsty U-verse IPTV to get switched on, but AT&T's already looking forward to the next big thing. As American mobile carriers get to work on various mobile TV initiatives, AT&T has apparently tapped MobiTV to play a large role in their outreach to the smallest screens; or perhaps "larger role" is a more accurate way of putting it, seeing how Cingular has been offering the California-based company's streaming video service on many of its handsets for over a year now. How exactly the mobile variant of U-verse will work is unclear -- it remains to be seen whether it'll be offered only to subscribers of AT&T's in-home U-verse service or will be launched on a broader scale -- but either way, MobiTV says they'll kick it off by offering their own content and add U-verse content into the mix as time goes on. Details haven't been finalized nor have Hancocks been issued on any contracts yet, but they deal seems as good as sealed given AT&T's and MobiTV's already tight relationship. With Sprint and Verizon having both committed to delivering mobile TV via MediaFLO and T-Mobile testing a variety of technologies, Cingular has remained a bit of an enigma; it feels good to finally have some closure, though we have to shudder a bit at the thought of clogging those sweet HSDPA airwaves with IPTV.

[Via MocoNews]