This Month in Mobile: Mixed Messaging

July was the cruelest month for two fledgling mobile-video businesses — Amp’d Mobile and Modeo — which, as of last week, appear to be down for the count.

At the same time, cable operators and Sprint Nextel took several paces forward on their wireless strategies. Cable’s joint venture with Sprint picked up the pace of rollouts this month, adding or expanding the availability of Pivot service in five markets in the past two weeks, for a total of 18.

Comcast ramped up Pivot service in Oregon and southwest Washington state, making it available now to more than three times the number of customers in the region after soft-launching a trial of the service in Portland, Ore., last fall.

Time Warner Cable began offering mobile service to customers in Corpus Christi, Texas, the 10th city where it now offers Pivot, while Bright House Networks went live in its first market — Orlando, Fla. — and Cox Communications turned up service in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Still, the Pivot partners haven’t disclosed specific subscriber numbers or other metrics that indicate take rates.

With the service, which provides TV clips and other media content on phones for an extra $15 to $25 per month, the cable operators are emphasizing the purported value of the integrated features available with Pivot.

Instead of a bundled price break, Pivot is positioned as an extension to the core services. The service allows subscribers to “take advantage of their triple-play products on the go,” said Curt Henninger, senior vice president and general manager for Comcast in Oregon and southwest Washington, in announcing the wider rollout in the region.

Meanwhile, Sprint inked a deal with Google to provide a mobile-Internet portal for the carrier’s broadband-wireless WiMax service, which it expects to start offering commercially next spring.

The Google deal came a week after Sprint announced a 20-year agreement with Craig McCaw’s Clearwire to jointly build out a WiMax network across the United States, eventually providing coverage to 300 million people.

For Sprint’s WiMax service, Google will provide a suite of communications applications, including Gmail e-mail and Google Talk instant-messaging, as well as its trademark search engine. Sprint and Google said they also will develop new location-based services for consumers, businesses and government customers.

“Google and Sprint will optimize the Internet experience for the digital lifestyle,” Sprint 4G Mobile Broadband president Barry West said in a statement. “This collaboration brings what will be the best mobile-Internet network together with the leading Internet-search company.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google itself has designs on becoming a wireless service provider: On July 20, the Internet-search kingpin committed to spending at least $4.6 billion in the Federal Communications Commission’s pending federal auction of the 700-Megahertz-band spectrum, if the agency agrees to adopt certain open-network conditions.

Sprint plans to test WiMax service in the Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas by the end of 2007, with commercial service expected to be available in a number of markets starting April 2008. Sprint and Clearwire plan to have deployed their WiMax networks to service 100 million people by year-end 2008.

In addition to Google’s apps, Sprint said its WiMax services will provide multimedia including music, video, TV and on-demand products. Eventually, according to Sprint, WiMax service will be available in vehicles for navigation information, news and entertainment.

Now for the bad news.

After spending four years on development and initiating a wide-scale mobile-TV test in New York, Crown Castle International pulled the plug on its Modeo initiative. The Houston company, which operates and manages more than 22,000 cellular-phone towers in the United States, announced it had negotiated a six-year lease agreement for the spectrum it had planned to use for Modeo.

Crown Castle is leasing the 1670- to 1675-Megahertz spectrum to a venture formed by two investment firms, Telcom Ventures and Columbia Capital, for $13 million per year. The cell-tower operator said it will incur $10 million in costs related to Modeo for 2007.

Crown Castle apparently cut its losses after failing to line up go-to-market partners for Modeo. Earlier this year, Qualcomm’s MediaFLO USA subsidiary locked up AT&T as a partner to carry live-TV channels, which, along with its deal with Verizon Wireless, gave MediaFLO distribution with the two biggest wireless carriers in the United States.

Under the deal with Telcom and Columbia, Crown Castle will transfer all assets related to the Modeo trial in New York that had been initiated earlier this year to the new venture. (Representatives for Columbia and Telcom did not respond to requests for information about how their new venture intends to use the spectrum.)

For now, the end of Modeo leaves one other mobile live-TV service provider in the United States besides MediaFLO: Aloha Partners’ HiWire, which earlier this month announced a deal with satellite-services company SES Americom to provide 24 channels for its Las Vegas trial.

MobiTV, which has signed content-distribution deals with several cable programmers and is currently the mobile-TV provider for the Pivot joint venture, is geared toward on-demand video.

Modeo’s beta test featured six cable channels — CNBC, Discovery Channel, E!, Fox News Channel, Fox Sports and MSNBC — although Crown Castle said it had licensed more content than it included in the test.

And the party might be officially over this week for Amp’d Mobile: The wireless-entertainment startup, which is in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings, will have its service suspended by Verizon Wireless as soon as July 31 at 12:01 a.m., unless it can find a buyer for its user contracts.

Los Angeles-based Amp’d stopped providing customer service last Monday, according to a notice on its Web site. On June 1, Amp’d filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

The startup — which targeted young men with a mix of video clips, games and music content — functioned as a mobile virtual-network operator, piggybacking on the Verizon Wireless network. Amp’d owed Verizon Wireless around $54 million as of July 23, according to bankruptcy court documents, while it had just $9,000 in cash.

Amp’d, founded in December 2005, reported having 200,000 subscribers at one point. Investors in the mobile venture included Intel, Qualcomm, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group and several venture-capital firms.

According to its bankruptcy filing, the privately held company has more than $100 million in debts. In addition to Verizon Wireless, other creditors include Motorola and Best Buy.

The company said it sought bankruptcy protection because its back-end infrastructure was unable to keep up with customer demand.

Amp’d also said that many of its customers — remember, the target market was young, male hipsters — did not pay their bills.