It has the characteristics needed for applications that require both high-power pulses and steady, battery-like flow.

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Standardized by the Advanced Television Systems Committee and formally adopted as the ATSC Mobile DTV Standard, the new technology allows broadcasters to use a portion of the existing 19.4 Megabit-per-second DTV channel capacity to transmit data with extremely robust characteristics suitable for mobile, pedestrian and handheld applications.

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Some characteristics are beyond their control: When the interest rates tick downward, loan applications flood through the door.

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As the two battle it out, each increasingly has assumed some characteristics of the other, with Amazon stretching into Google's realms of online advertising, video streaming, applications and devices such as smartphones and tablets.

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