Video Everywhere

Call for Video

While handhelds let you easily watch video anywhere, in most cases you must load the player before you leave home, or use a separate service. New cell phones and networks let you receive video anywhere--well, anywhere there's a fast 3G network such as EvDO or UMTS. Check with your provider to find out if you have service in your area; if so, for $15 to $25 per month added to your cell phone bill, Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon will give you unlimited access to a rather small selection of games, music, and video (see the chart below).

The services have a lot of content overlap. All offer short clips from the usual suspects such as CNN, The Discovery Channel, ESPN, Fox, The Weather Channel, and others. Typically you can view a few music videos, recent sports and news highlights, or movie trailers. Most channels aren't live but are updated regularly.

Currently Sprint offers the most options and has a feature the others don't: live video feeds. Your device can get live news feeds from ABC, C-SPAN, Fox, and other sources. You can also see over a dozen channels that show the same video feed going to television sets.

But just because you can see video on your cell, doesn't mean you'd want to.

Navigating the menus, plus waiting for the media players to load and the content to buffer, can take 10 to 30 seconds. The clips are often highly compressed files at 176-by-144-pixel resolution and 15 frames per second, playing on just part of the phone's screen. Even good images are so tiny that it's not fun to look at them for long. Not that you can--most phone content is less than 3 minutes long; anything longer may rebuffer every minute or so.

My rule for mobile video is simple: The smaller the screen, the more basic and personal the content. Lawrence of Arabia? No. Sports highlights? Perhaps. Talking heads and short, focused clips? Okay. Hilarious video podcasts from Strong Bad Emails? Now you're talking!