AT&T Mobile MediaFLO TV launches in May

Well over a year after it announced it had wrested a major digital TV platform announcement away from Sprint, AT&T finally said this morning it would be debuting MediaFLO service in the US next month.

More information about the upcoming service -- for instance, what it will be named, which exclusive channels it will supply -- will be announced at CTIA in Las Vegas. In the meantime, we do know AT&T's launch devices will include LG's Vu and Samsung's Access.

The EU, with a hearty push from Comissioner for Information Society and the Media Viviane Reding, adopted mobile TV standard DVB-H, and in South Korea, where mobile TV viewership is among the highest in the world, is on the T- and S-DMB standards.

The US' market for mobile TV is competitive and consumer-driven, so even though Verizon's VCAST uptake has been soft, the additional -- albeit lagging -- support from AT&T pushes MediaFLO toward becoming the accepted standard for US mobile broadcast simply because it is available from the two largest mobile companies in the country.