CANNES, France — Nokia Corp. is showing off the industry's first live TV-to-mobile demonstration by using digital TV signals made available this week during the 3GSM World Congress by French broadcaster Telediffusion de France (TDF).

The TV content, encoded in H.263, is encapsulated in IP data, and then broadcast using the MPEG-2 transport layer. TDF's transmission tower in Vallauris, seven kilometers away from Cannes, has been sending the signals to the conference center.

Tero Naumi, senior product manager, IP datacasting, Nokia Corp., reported that Nokia yesterday received an unexpected phone call from the French police, who complained of signal interference. While it remains unclear what exactly caused the so-called interference, the incidence prompted Nokia and TDF to reduce the transmission power from 1 kilowatt down to 1 watt, Naumi said.

Despite the incident, the conference building equipped with a repeater has been successfully receiving the TV signals. During the demo, a Nokia 7710 handset received and decoded TV broadcasts-- transmitted at 300 kilobits per second-- on a QCIF resolution screen at 10 to 15 frames per second.

Strictly speaking, the demonstration signal transmission was not compliant to DVB-H spec, as certain hardware and software elements had to resort to Nokia's proprietary implementation in order to make the public demonstration possible in time. For one, the TV tuner used in the Nokia 7710 handset was based on the DVB-T spec, rather than DVB-H. The compression format used for content was H.263, instead of H.264.

The proprietary nature of Nokia/TDF's transmission made it impossible for a few other companies, such as Freescale and DiBcome-- to receive TFF signals during the conference.

Naumi, however, noted that the demonstration system can provide anyone interested in DVB-H a good commercial pilot platform. TDF is keen on running DVB-H pilots in France this year, he added.