Smaller Screens
When Steve Jobs announced last fall that iTunes fans could buy episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives for $2 a pop, a market for portable TV shows emerged overnight. And services like MobiTV and Verizon's Vcast let cell phone owners watch TV on the go.
If your eyes can handle TV shows playing on screens as small as an inch on the diagonal, MobiTV's $10-a-month service (available in the United States on Cingular, Sprint, and a few regional carriers) streams content from CNN, MSNBC, and other stations to a supported handset.
Verizon's $15-per-month Vcast lets you watch live TV, but only on phones that support Verizon's high-speed EVDO wireless service--and only in markets that offer it. Cingular recently announced plans to offer 18 channels of video as part of its $20-a-month Media Net package. The service will include 3- to 5-minute clips from popular programs such as King of the Hill and That's So Raven.
But don't expect to be watching Desperate Housewives on your handset any time soon. Mobile TV is more likely to promote conventional TV than to supplant it, says Kurt Scherf of Parks Associates. NBC, for example, says that iTunes helped boost ratings for The Office. And the producers of ABC's Lost plan a spinoff for Verizon phones called Lost Video Diaries. Each 2-minute "mobisode" will have characters and plots that don't appear on the TV series. Similar mobisodes for Paris Hilton's The Simple Life are also said to be on the way.
Tune in Tomorrow
New ways to distribute digital video may change the way you find as well as view programs. In the future, Gartner analyst Allen Weiner predicts, you'll discover your favorite shows via recommendations from friends on social networks, or through video sharing sites such as Revver and YouTube or search engines such as Blinkx and Truveo.
You can't yet watch Monk or Firefly reruns on demand, but that day is certainly coming. Don't touch that dial.
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