Turning On and To Television. Live! From Your Cell Phone
"One of the promises of digital media is the ability to get news when you want, from wherever you want. The FeedRoom has been a champion of that idea, becoming the leading destination for streaming news on the Web. Now they are going a step further. Next month, The FeedRoom will begin delivering video news to cell phones via the Sprint Network. A monthly subscription fee will give you access to video clips of the latest news stories, all right in the palm of your hand....
Some cell phone users already have access to services like games and digital pictures. According to Webster, Sprint has done a lot of surveying to find out what type of new services people want. Their research has indicated it's streaming news. He says people are looking for piece of mind, 'That's why I think you buy into the service because you want the security of knowing that when something happens you can find out about it and you can see the pictures related to it....'
That piece of mind goes for just $2.95 a month. The industry standard is about $3.95 for a comparable service. The video will be initially deployed on two of Sprints handsets, the Samsung N400 and A500. Currently, Sprint has about 1,000,000 vision-enabled sets and that is expected to grow to 2 million by the end of the second quarter.
To access the video, people first have to download the application from the Web. Once downloaded, the video can be accessed after paying the monthly fee. The FeedRoom will be providing 5 to 8 clips at a time, with regular updates throughout the day. Each clip will be about a minute and 30 seconds, the length of time of a standard broadcast news package.
I had the opportunity to view a video sample on one of the Sprint phones. I was skeptical at first, but I have to say the quality of the picture was much better than I had anticipated. The streaming was very slow however, similar to viewing video on a dial-up Web connection. Broadcast delivers 30 frames per second, the Internet delivers around 15 frames per second and the cell phone just 1 frame per second. Of course the quality will be improving overtime and I think the excitement of viewing the news when and where you want will over shadow the short-term technical bugs....
The real potential will be unlocked when The FeedRoom offers SMS broadcasting to subscribers for breaking news events. Overtime, the streaming video can also be geo-targeted, so people can access their local news and of course the advertising potential is enormous." [TVSPY.com, via The Lost Remote]
I'm fascinated by this, because I was in my car Saturday morning when I heard what had happened to the Space Shuttle Columbia. In 1986 (also during the week of my birthday), I was in my college dorm room when I heard about the Challenger. A friend who lived on the floor below mine called and told me to turn on the TV. That's how I found out about it because I was listening to music instead (actually, I was blasting music and almost didn't hear the phone ring). Of course I turned on the TV.
On September 11, 2001, I didn't hear about the terrorist attacks in my car because I was listening to an Audible title instead of the news on the radio. It's not like the traffic congestion signs were telling me to turn to a news station, so it wasn't until I got to work that someone told me what had happened. Of course we turned on the TV.
And then last weekend, I was driving Rosie (the cutest puppy in the whole wide world) to the groomer when I heard about the Columbia. By pure chance, I had been listening to a blues show on NPR the night before, a rare event since I'm usually listening to my Archos Jukebox. Of course I wanted to turn on the TV, but I wasn't anywhere near one. If I had been able to, I would have pulled over to the side of the road, opened my cell phone, and "turned on the TV." [The Shifted Librarian]
5:38:50 AM 
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