Japan's Mobile-TV Fight

A battle between Japan's two biggest wireless carriers over mobile-television technology has raised a dilemma in the country: continue to choose home-grown innovations that may isolate Japan or risk backing a standard based on nascent technology from the US.

As early as this month, Japan's telecommunications ministry plans to choose just one operator to run a new platform for delivering TV shows and other multimedia content to cellphones and other portable devices from 2012. KDDI Corp., Japan's No. 2 mobile carrier by subscribers, wants to use Qualcomm Inc.'s MediaFlo mobile-broadcast technology, which is already in use in the U.S. The country's biggest carrier, NTT DoCoMo Inc., supports a format called ISDB-Tmm that is based on Japan's existing digital-TV standard.