Media Sense / Blog
Live TV on your iPhone? It’s true.
By: Michael Lipe, creative director, March 13, 2009
This year’s March Madness college basketball tournament will be broadcast live on your iPhone.That’s right LIVE on your iPhone.
A company called MobiTV will be releasing a new App that will allow users (once they have purchased the app and pay a small per-game fee) to view the selected tournament games live on the iPhone or iTouch. Many other mobile phone companies have promoted their live streaming audio over their phone devices, but this is the first I have heard of live video over a mobile device.
Once this door is kicked open, there will be an entire new word of broadcast opportunity that consumers will demand. The ongoing consolidation of voice, data, video (and now live broadcast) into one handheld unit is the clear future of mobile media and media saavy companies will respond accordingly.
While the optimist in me is very excited about this type of development, the skeptic in me is wary of performance issues, such as audio/video compression, signal loss, etc. So if your team makes it to the Final Four, I wouldn’t have a watching party where everyone is gathered around your phone. But, if this is any indication of the direction this is headed, any technical issues will be quickly resolved if the public is willing to pay for the content and advertisers get on board.
Here is an article that details the plan…
Live sports are coming to the iPhone.
MobiTV, which offers prime-time TV programming for cellphones, has cut a deal with CBS Sports to show 63 NCAA basketball games in an iPhone/iTouch app for $4.99. The games begin next week, but the App goes on sale Thursday.
The app grants access to all of the CBS Sports NCAA games, and goes one step further than television, says MobiTV senior vice-president Ray DeRenzo.
On TV, you can only see one game at a time, but on the iPhone or iTouch, you can choose to watch any of 4 games that are happening at any given time until the elimination process begins. So, for instance, if you tune in and see that games in New York, Florida, Illinois and California are available to watch, you just click to see the game of your choice.
To watch the sports live, you need to have access to WiFi, like the recently introduced Joost app for watching live TV shows on the iPhone and iTouch.
This isn’t the first live sports app for the iPhone. Turner Broadcasting showed footage from the National Basketball Association’s All-Star game in February for 99 cents.
On Sprint and AT&T, MobiTV offers TV shows from the four networks, NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox. The company says it would love to bring that programming to the iPhone, but tech hurdles prevent that currently.
MobiTV needs to be able to sell subscriptions, where the iTunes App Store is built to make direct sales. MobiTV got around that with the NCAA games by selling a “ticket” to buy all the games. The NCAA tourney gets under way on 3/19.
Meanwhile, beyond the live games, Thought Equity Motion just unveiled a free iPhone/iTouch app to see 2009 NCAA previews and past videos.
Article Link
http://blogs.usatoday.com/technologylive/2009/03/live-sports-are.html?sr=hotnews
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Posted in Technology on 3/13/09