Mobile TV

Seems like Virgin's Mobile TV offering, UK's first, has been less that exciting in its takeup. see here (its from a Groaniad article). Quote:

Despite an aggressive GBP2.5 (US$4.9) million ad campaign, fronted by former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, Virgin Mobile, the first to market in the U.K. with a broadcast TV service to mobile phones, has failed to gain much traction, according to this article in The Guardian. In fact, it quotes industry insiders as saying Virgin Mobile has signed up “significantly” fewer than 10,000 customers for its Virgin Mobile TV (VMTV) service.

Yet another Mobile promise being broken then.....we at Broadsight have been fairly sceptical of Mobile TV as it is touted today, as we feel it needs to be put in an ecosystem, much like iTunes did for music - but early research seemed to indicate it was quite well received.

So what gives? Quoting some mo' moCo

To remedy this problem, Virgin Mobile plans to offer a wider range of handsets later this year and introduce new services such as allowing people to download and store TV programs on their phones to view when they are out of coverage. But these measures won’t drive results if rival operators are right. They maintain VMTV’s problem is its limited range of channels. VMTV, backed by BT, uses the digital radio spectrum to broadcast TV, allowing viewers to watch five channels – compared to O2, which offers users 16 channels.

Ok...its in the details...but how is O2 doing then?

Well, I Googled, Dogpiled and Technorati'd away to find some mo' news but computer says no....all that came up was the breathless stuff from a year ago. Anyone else have any news?

Just had a look at GigaOm's NewTeeVee and there is this article with a video from Barack Obama's launch of his bid for the US presidency....

I'm using my laptop's 3G card right now, and a sign comes up on the video clip that says:

"This player requires a faster connection to enable smooth playing of this video.

- the connection speed detected will cause a potentially unviewable experience"

Uh oh....a paltry 384 kB/sec won't hack it any more in an IP TV/Video world - is this "no signal" signalling the end of the 3G video dream?