In China, the start of the Olympic Games is the meta-deadline that looms above everything else. The list of things that absolutely, positively must be finished by the Olympics is pretty daunting: Build the Olympic facilities, clean up Beijing's air, complete the extensive subway expansion, fix the traffic problems, get the Capital Steel factory moved to Tianjin, find a way to stop all that Gobi Desert dust from blowing into town, etc. From that list, I am guessing that "finish the Olympic facilities" will be the only one that will actually be completed. They'll bluff everything else. But perhaps that's just pessimism. When the Chinese put their minds to something, they can accomplish fantastic things.

The one other thing that is supposed to be ready by the Olympics is the commercial rollout of Digital Multimedia Broadcast (DMB), and the application that is being talked up for this technology is the ability to watch the games on your mobile phone. China is now planning to trial DMB broadcasts in 2007, with an eye on commercial deployment in time for the Olympic Games, in August 2008. But even if they get the system deployed, will people be able to watch? Or want to?

China Mobile, China's mobile telecoms heavyweight and the largest mobile phone operator in the world, as well as rival China Unicom, will both apparently sign agreements with manufacturers shortly to ensure a supply of phones. Samsung is reportedly already on board, and other manufacturers looking to shift premium phones probably won't be far behind.

But the market will be small. Phones priced below 1,500 yuan (about US$190) account for 70 percent of the market, and these are not likely to include whizzy features like receiving mobile television broadcasts. Indeed, even the two operators above expect only about 8 percent of China's mobile users to adopt DMB over the next five years, let alone the two between now and the Olympics. And that's probably a rosy number.

Actual size.

But will people even want to watch a huge event on a small screen? The history of portable video is pretty dismal. People have limited tolerance for microscopic screens, and nothing chews up a battery faster than keeping a screen lit for an hour or two (one of the things that dogs Apple's current generation of iPods is short battery life when using video). The Chinese live and die by their mobile phones, and that means stretching their battery life. China is certainly excited about the Olympics in a way that's hard for people elsewhere to understand. But for that reason I expect that people will be much more interested in gathering around their televisions to watch with friends and family than around their mobile phones. Even commuters may find their Olympic jones better served by the larger digital TV screens that are increasingly common in busses than by their already overworked mobile phones.

Of course, this may all be a moot point. First they have to get the damn thing working on some sort of commercial scale. China's DVB standard is based on the domestic TD-SCDMA 3G telephony standard, which has been announced as a national 3G standard and currently undergoing tests prior to the awarding of commercial licenses. However, the TD-SCDMA rollout has been anything but smooth. It's one more thing that absolutely positively must be done by the Olympics, but it has already blown through a few deadlines and remains fraught with technical problems.

So we'll see if we can really watch the Olympics on our mobile phones. In the meantime, I wouldn't throw away my big-screen TV anytime soon.