In South Korea, mobile TV has been available for the past five years. A trial is under way in the Washington area offering TV on certain cellphones, portable DVD players and netbooks.

When South Korea plays Greece on June 12 in its World Cup soccer opener in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, life will not necessarily grind to a halt back in Seoul.

Many fans will instead follow a live broadcast of the match on their mobile phones. In South Korea, free-to-air mobile TV is a five-year-old fact of life. According to the country’s broadcasters, 27 million people — 56 percent of the population — watch regularly.

To read this report in The New York Times in full, see:
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/technology/31mobiletv.html