TV's ready for soft cell
Cable nets such as MSNBC, Discovery, TLC dialed in
MobiTV offers subscribers 15 channels of live television, including cable nets such as MSNBC, CNBC, Discovery and the Learning Channel, along with several Web-only networks.
Company plans to add more channels soon and is even negotiating to access local network feeds, which would allow users to watch their hometown affiliates anywhere in the country.
Such a service could add a new revenue stream for networks -- particularly broadcast outlets already looking at new financial models. The portability could also help boost persons-using-television rates -- particularly among young cellphone users, the hard-to-reach target aud for most broadcast and cable nets.
MobiTV is launching on SprintPCS because its technology integrated the easiest, but the company plans to offer its services on all major U.S. cellular carriers by next year. It also plans to launch soon in Japan and other countries.
"We're really a virtual TV MSO for a completely untapped market, the mobile user," said Phillip Alveda, CEO of MobiTV parent company Idetic. "This offers quite an opportunity for our network operator, broadcast and even regular MSO partners to extend their brands to a new market of over 1.2 billion mobile phone users worldwide."
MobiTV will cost $9.99 per month for subscribers to Sprint's PCS Vision multimedia service. An unspecified chunk of that stays with Sprint, while the rest is split between Idetic and the networks it pays to broadcast.
Users will also see the same commercials that air on television, giving networks additional eyeballs to potentially increase marketing revenue. Idetic notes that it will be able to provide detailed and exact viewership demographics.
Sprint did not break down how many of its nearly 18 million subs have phones that will work with MobiTV but said three of its most popular models are compatible and three more will go on sale before the holidays.
"The big news here is you can do this on a $50 phone," said Alveda. "Lots of people can get it now, and soon nearly everyone will."
Mobile multimedia has been slow to grow in the U.S. because most domestic networks haven't yet upgraded to the high-speed capabilities available in Asia and Europe. Idetic is confident, however, that its service, which streams at three frames per second (about one-tenth the normal television frame rate), will approximate the look of regular TV on the two-inch screens most cell phone users have.
The only other company currently offering TV content on cell phones is RealNetworks, which provides its RealOne subscription service to mobile users. RealOne doesn't provide live television from partners such as E! and ABC News but compilations of clips and exclusive Internet content.
