A day after I posted a piece arguing against live mobile phone TV, Todd Spangler in Multichannel News reports that Verizon will announce a new service offering "fewer than one-dozen channels" of live TV at the International CES show opening this weekend in Las Vegas. The new service will compete with the upcoming Modeo beta and the Sprint-and-Cingular-centric first-mover MobiTV promising better video quality. It will require an extra monthly charge and a new higher-powered mobile phone.
A much-quoted InStat survey of mobile video subscribers last year was skeptical of the entire market, and a more recent BBC Online Video Survey of users in Britain, where advanced mobile phone technology is more standardized, gave disappointing results for mobile video promoters.
We'll see.
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