Verizon Tunes into Mobile Broadcast

Without fanfare, Verizon Wireless launched the nation’s first mobile broadcast service Thursday in 20 markets, including Albuquerque, N.M., Dallas, Denver and Kansas City. The service is priced between $15 and $25 per month depending on the market, but few further details were announced.

The “V CAST Mobile TV,” service is delivered on Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFLO mobile TV network. MediaFLO is capable of offering 20 channels, but Verizon will offer just eight channels initially, some with live feeds from the broadcaster’s cable service, and others that offer time-shifted and on-demand content.

Announced programming partners are CBS, Comedy Central, ESPN, Fox, MTV, NBC News, NBC Entertainment and Nickelodeon. Also, the carrier will offer two mobile television-capable handsets: initially, the SCH-u620 from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is available, with the VX9400 from LG Electronics Co. Ltd. to follow.

MediaFLO operates in the 700MHz band. As that band is cleared of its existing occupants in more markets, the service footprint will be expanded, Verizon said.

The Verizon launch will be a make-or-break trial for mobile television. Today’s mobile video services – live and on-demand – are delivered in a unicast format over 3G networks, making for a one-to-one link with each subscriber viewing the content. Quality issues and clunky user interfaces have been blamed for the disappointing uptake of the services to date. MediaFLO instead is a TV-dedicated overlay network, and offers a one-to-many multicast architecture, which makes it more efficient to deliver video. And Verizon has invested in an extensive, sleek programming user interface that’s searchable and offers previews, descriptions and an easy-to-navigate grid. All of that contributes to a quality of service more akin to what we would find in our living rooms than the Web cam-like quality of mobile video to date, the carrier said.

However, high subscription prices, a limited palette of content, the presence of advertising, the need to buy an expensive handset and a proven lack of appetite for long-format mobile-consumable video are all elephants in the MediaFLO room. Will users pay $25 to watch one-hour dramas or an entire Red Sox game on a three-inch screen with advertising? Verizon and others say yes. IDC also paints a rosy picture, forecasting that 24 million Americans will use broadcast mobile-TV and video-clip services by 2010, compared with just 7 million today. One note is that broadcast mobile TV will not be limited to the handset; the ability to route it to a laptop or other consumer electronics device is the long tail to all of this. And, boosters say, as the concept becomes ubiquitous, user acceptance will follow.

Verizon has company in betting on mobile TV. AT&T Inc.’s Cingular Wireless LLC also has announced that it will use MediaFLO for mobile TV, launching commercial services later this year. Alltel Wireless and T-Mobile are both trialing the technology. Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel Corp. finished up a MediaFLO trial in January and has decided to not use the service for now, although the carrier did say it could reconsider that decision at a later point. However, Sprint’s planned WiMAX network is widely considered to have potential for mobile broadcast carriage.

AT&T Inc. www.att.com  

Qualcomm Inc. www.qualcomm.com  

Sprint Nextel Corp. www.sprint.com  

T-Mobile USA Inc. www.t-mobile.com  

Verizon www.verizon.com

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