Monday, November 27, 2006

Phones, lies and video tape...

Did anyone ever make much use out of MMS? How about WAP? Or the supposed killer application which was was going to drive the move to 3G, video calls? No thought not, me either...

The latest attempt by the mobile operators to rake back the vast amounts of money they paid out for the 3G licenses however is mobile TV. You have to ask yourself, why? This is almost as pointless as video calling, the only time I'd be at all interested in using this would be when I'm stuck on a train for several hours, but it's hard enough sending text messages, or trying to keep a voice call going, let alone get a UMTS connection stable enough to stream live TV to your handset.

However it looks like people in the industry are starting share my disquiet about possible adoption, let alone the shaky business model of the entire thing. I'm not even going to mention the possibility of a "real" video iPod turning up and totally cannibalising the market. Why stream live over a shaky UMTS connection when you can just download and then time shift your shows?

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