television on your 3G mobile

Vodafone and Sky have teamed up to bring you Sky television on your mobile. Will people really sit and watch television on such a tiny screen? Well, Apple has done really well with it's newest video enabled iPod so it would seem that, yes, despite the screen size some people just can't get enough television.

At the end of June I moved to a 3G mobile service myself so decided to try downloading and watching a video on my phone. The process of finding content was easy enough considering my mobile provider now "helpfully provides me with" links everytime they send a message to inform me I have new voice mail. The download, a couple of mb of data, took perhaps a minute and a half. When I opened the file my phone, a Symbian based Nokia 6630 smartphone running RealPlayer, crashed and told me it didn't have enough memory. After closing some programmes I was able to watch a 3 minute long news clip on my phone.

Other than the pleasure of trying something new, I wouldn't say I found the experience particularly useful. It might get lots of use when a major incident occurs and people urgently want to know what's going on, like on the 07 July when bombs hit London, or when there is a big sporting even like England's recent success on the cricket pitch, but nightly episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, or Coronation Street? Yeh, ok, they're gonna make a lot of money off of this...

Comments

[David Brake]

Have the video iPods really been v popular or just had a lot of media attention? I am guessing the latter myself.

[Cybersoc (Robin Hamman)]

Hi David. I had a look at the Apple site and found a claim that they sold over 1 million videos in the first 3 weeks of making videos available on itunes. I've added a link in the post above (where is says "really well"). Sounds like a reasonable success to me although it's fair to think that many of these sales will have been to people who bought the new ipod and needed some video to show off the new functionality. Whether they return and buy more video, or become regular video downloaders, is a different matter.