NEW YORK — Picture whipping out your cell phone and catching up with "Lost" or "Jeopardy," or watching the local evening news, all for free.

You can do it with an imported Chinese phone, but not with any phone sold in the U.S. — at least not without monthly fees.

It's one of the reasons the U.S. is behind several other countries when it comes to making television an attractive option for cell phones. Carrier business models are partly at fault, but choices about TV technology made long ago are largely to blame.

Most phones sold in Japan can tune in free TV broadcasts, and there are tens of millions of viewers. Similar cell phones are also available in South Korea, Germany and China.

But only 3 percent of Americans regularly watched video on their cell phones late last year, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That includes people who watched short, downloaded clips rather than broadcast TV.

For starters, you can blame the impending shutdown of all full-power analog TV broadcasts on Feb. 17, a deadline set by the government. That Chinese handset, made by ZTE Corp., can only tune in analog transmissions. Because most of those are going away, there's no real point in selling phones like that in the U.S.

China is keeping its analog broadcasts until 2015, so the phones are viable there. Ironically, the TV reception chip inside comes from a California company, Telegent Systems Inc.

There are no phones anywhere that can tune in the digital broadcasts that are replacing the analog U.S. broadcasts.

When the U.S. digital TV standard was laid down in the early '90s by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, it was optimized for high-definition signals to stationary antennas, according to Mark Richter, president of the industry group.

At the time, cell phones had screens that could display eight digits and nothing else, so little thought was given making the broadcasts work with mobile gadgets.

The Europeans created their digital television standard later and made it more amenable to mobile reception, Richter said. Thus, there are now phones sold in Germany that can receive local digital TV broadcasts.

Weijie Yun, Telegent's chief executive, said it's theoretically possible to receive U.S. digital broadcasts on a phone, but engineers have yet to overcome key technical challenges.

U.S. phone carriers have had to look to other solutions. Cell-phone technology company Qualcomm Inc. has created a network that broadcasts signals designed for cell phones. AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless sell some handsets that can receive these broadcasts.

Sprint Nextel Corp. has contracted with MobiTV Inc., which streams lo-fi video over the phones' broadband connections.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless charge $15 a month for 10 channels. Sprint's MobiTV is $9.99 a month as standalone service.

In-Stat analyst Michelle Abraham estimates that Qualcomm's MediaFLO has 100,000 subscribers. MobiTV has done better, with about 4 million.

Research director John Barrett at analysis firm Parks Associates points to the fees as a problem, and recommends that operators provide free content.

"A free taste would go a long way in making the consumer case for mobile TV," he wrote in a recent report. "Mobile TV services have taken off in Japan and South Korea, where service is offered free of charge. In Italy, where additional fees have been the norm, usage has been limited."

U.S. TV broadcasters are quite eager to provide free service to cell phones, just as they do to antenna TVs. They've formed the Open Mobile Video Coalition, which estimates that ad-financed TV for cell phones could be a $2 billion market. They want to reach cell phones through a wireless standard the ATSC is creating that uses regular TV frequencies from existing towers.

Such broadcasts could be operational before the end of next year. It's not completely clear that they would be free TV — the possibility to charge viewers monthly fees will be built in.

The big question then, Abraham said, is whether broadcasters will be able to persuade carriers to sell TV-capable phones.