As an effective technique for combating multipath fading and for high-bit-rate transmission over wireless channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is extensively used in modern digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) systems, such as the OFDM based Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld (DVB-H) system, to support high performance bandwidth-efficient multimedia services. OFDM based DVB-H system is very sensitive to the nonlinear distortion at the transmitter and the carrier frequency offset at the receiver. The objective of this paper is to research and analyze the performance of the OFDM based DVB-H system in the presence of carrier frequency offset and nonlinear distortion under multipath fading channel. A closed form of symbol error probability is derived for the OFDM based DVB-H system in the presence of carrier frequency offset and nonlinear distortion under multipath fading channel. Theoretical results show closely matching with those obtained by simulations for the OFDM based DVB-H system in the presence of carrier frequency offset and nonlinear distortion under multipath fading channel.