Mobile TV providers in China hope citizens there who are not able to watch the games on television will be able to do so with the help of their mobile phones, Reuters reported Thursday. Although mobile TV platforms were introduced about four years ago, they have not yet reached their full potential.

Some events such as the Olympics require immediate updates and not necessarily quality images, said Yun Weijie, president and chief executive of Telegent Systems, a firm based in Silicon Valley that manufactures semiconductors. The Olympics could be just the boost Chinese mobile TV needs to propel it forward.

"TV will become a standard feature for cell phones in China by the end of this year, just like cameras," Weijie told Reuters.

Telegent makes chips that permit mobile phones to receive free TV signals. Weijie mentioned that by the end of last year, nearly five million handsets all over Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe used his company's chips, with China accounting for half of the figure, according to Reuters.

In-Stat China, a market research company based in Arizona, showed that more than 60 percent of current mobile phone users show an interest in mobile TV.

"Nowadays, people's attention and time is segmented, so they want multi-functional converged handsets," Kevin Li, In-Stat China's telecoms research director, told Reuters.

TV on mobile phones is common in Japan and South Korea. The problem in China is that viewers may be discouraged by the time it takes for the screen to be switched on and the “poor quality” of images, Weijie said, according to Reuters.

China Mobile initiated trials of 3G services in eight cities, including Beijing, using TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a variant of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access).

China Mobile will provide 40,000 mobile phones with the TV feature to staff and guests at the Games, while 8,000 will be offered by ZTE Corp., Reuters reported.

"The original plan was to distribute the phones after the games," an anonymous ZTE official told Reuters. "However, China Mobile decided to do it before the games kicked off, because they think the development of mobile TV technology has already reached a satisfactory level."

Last year, China had 600 million mobile network subscribers. Mobile TV subscribers add up to only 2 percent, or 12 million people, and according to data from CCID Consulting in Beijing, they gather US$670 million of revenue annually. The firm also predicted that by 2012 the numbers of both mobile and mobile TV subscribers could get multiplied by 10, Reuters reported.