SAN FRANCISCO-Mobile television company MobiTV announced it crossed the 500,000-subscriber mark, news that coincides with the launch of its new multimedia software platform.
“Things are just going through the roof,” boasted Paul Scanlan, chief operating officer of startup Idetic Inc., the company behind the MobiTV brand.
Indeed, the company now lists itself as the nation’s 13th-largest TV vendor, behind the likes of Comcast and DirectTV.
“Clearly (mobile TV) has become not a crazy thing to do,” Scanlan said.
When it first launched with Sprint Nextel Corp. two years ago, MobiTV offered a handful of live TV channels with video streams of between 1 frame and 2 frames per second.
“We call it our DOS era,” Scanlan joked.
Today, the company boasts partnerships with close to a dozen operators around the world-including Cingular Wireless L.L.C., T-Mobile USA Inc., Orange SA in Europe and Canada’s three largest wireless operators-and a video service running as fast as 15 frames per second. Standard TV broadcasts run at around 30 frames per second.
Further, MobiTV’s new media platform-dubbed MobiTV2-is a grand attempt to position the company at the nexus of wireless multimedia. Scanlan said the new platform combines live TV broadcasts with 50 channels of ad-free radio from Music Choice. It also gives the company the ability to offer premium and pay-per-view channels, just like standard cable operators, as well as a TV Guide-style programming list. The company’s ultimate goal is to have its software compile all wireless multimedia-collecting video and audio streams from cellular networks, broadcast networks like MediaFLO and DVB-H, and even broadband networks like WiMAX.
“This whole platform is designed to be a unified system,” Scanlan said.
Some industry watchers predict the mobile TV scene will hit the big time-researcher Juniper Research forecasts that revenues from mobile TV subscriptions will rise from $136 million this year to a whopping $7.6 billion by 2010. Others, however, offer a more cautious view.
“Whilst mobile TV is the mobile industry’s `next big thing,’ mobile operators should remember previous so-called success stories,” wrote research and consulting firm Current Analysis in a recent note. “Push-to-talk, for example, has not (as of yet) lived up to its initial hype.”
Nonetheless, MobiTV continues to evangelize the potential for the technology. Scanlan said the company tracks the activity of its subscribers and has found that most users watch only 10 minutes to 15 minutes of TV at a time. He described it as TV “snacking,” and said it does not replace regular TV watching.
Scanlan said MobiTV also tracks network usage and can adjust data streams if networks get too loaded.
As mobile TV gains steam, some carriers are taking over the sales of MobiTV’s offering. Sprint Nextel, Orange, Telus and others have rebranded MobiTV with their own logos. Although this somewhat diminishes the power of the MobiTV brand, Scanlan said white-label sales improve the company’s sales prospects to carriers and subscribers.
“That’s how you do business,” he said.
