Ben Chamy at CNet has a nice write-up of what we can expect from this week’s CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show—CeBit for cellphones, basically—with a focus on mobile TV device and how carriers hope they will “save the cell phone industry.” We’ve been sort of lukewarm on the whole mobile video bit, simply because the current offering is somewhat lackluster and it suffers from the same issue that portable video players do: not enough opportunity to watch them. That being said, while it might not be a compelling feature to revolutionize the industry, mobile TV would be a pretty nice ‘value add.’ Sprint’s service already has 150k subscribers, so obviously some people are interested.
I would expect to see a lot more about mobile TV throughout the week as different carriers promote their mobile media plans at CTIA.
But save the mobile industry? I think the reason wireless content downloads aren’t blowing up for carriers is because most people don’t want to pay extra money for data. You don’t have to pay your ISP a dollar every time you download a new wallpaper for your PC. Perhaps TV will be compelling enough to warrant a subscription fee—despite many replacing their TiVo with Bit Torrent, cable and satellite are still the dominant television services.
