MobiTV has closed its UK office to concentrate on the US market, reports New Media Age. Most of the story is behind a subscription barrier, but it appears it is actively removing its service from its two UK (indeed, European) customers, 3UK and Orange. “It has closed down its aggregation service with 3 and will no longer provide its downloadable TV Java application to Orange.” MobiTV is on a lot of carriers in North America (US, Canada and Mexico) and some other Latin American countries.
UPDATE: UPDATE: We have some more info from the story: A spokesperson for MobiTV said that it was “opening a research centre in Sweden and aren’t leaving Europe”… Also, Orange is continuing to work with MobiTV as an aggregation partner, although that may change.
What's that flushing sound I hear? Oh, it's MobiTV going down the drain. Once FLO is out in the US they will lose AT&T and only have Sprint plus I hear their numbers aren't doing so well in LatAm especially at that price point. They probably should have sold the company or gone public when they had the chance, thinking it's too late now for this first comer to the Mobile TV party.
These guys are in big trouble. Their Unicast topology doesn't scale. The content deals they have are bogus. Who wants to watch CSPAN1 and 2 on their cellphone? Their picture and sound quality is crap compared to FLO. And the premise of subscription based TV on a cellphone is flawed. The average Joe isn't going to pay 10-20 bucks a month to watch TV on his cellphone. Their only hope is to drop the subscription fees and find a way to make revenue selling ads.
It's hard to believe that the VCs gave these guys 100 million dollars, Go figure.
This Sweden thing makes sense since the CTO came from Popwire.
Pocket Live TV has just been announced which gives you 100 channels without a subscription, just a one-time fee. That's more like it !
http://www.makayama.com/pocketlivetv.html