Germany has awarded the nationwide platform for DVB-H to Mobile 3.0, a JV between Mobiles Fernsehen Deutschland (MFD), which has been running a DMB service since 2006, and Neva Media, itself a joint venture comprising publishing houses Burda and Holtzbrinck as well as media managers Paulus Neef, Bernd Curanz and Christiane zu Salm. The broadcasters lined up for the service include public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, commercial stations RTL, SAT.1, Pro Sieben, VOX, n-tv and N24 reports Rapid TV News. There’ll also be some multimedia radio services offered by Digital 5, bigBuddy and soccer Bundesliga channel kick.fm.

Meanwhile, in France Orange has applied for mobile TV licenses for two of the proposed 16 mobile TV channels in the country; one channel will be dedicated to sport and the other to the 18-35 age bracket. There is disagreement over the business model for the services, with the publicly owned TV broadcasters planning on an ad-supported model while the mobile operators want to charge fees—there’s some effort to get an industry wide agreement, with some of France’s largest broadcasters saying that advertising revenue would not be enough to develop the DVB-H services reports Total Telecom. SFR hasn’t bothered bidding for a DVB-H license, instead announcing that it has 350,000 users for its 3G mobile TV service paying 6-10 euros (US$8.50-9.50) per month.