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Downwardly Mobile
Tuesday was a pretty bloody day for fledgling mobile-TV companies — well, for those that weren’t fortunate enough to align themselves with AT&T or Verizon Wireless, anyway.
The first news to break on this front was the impending shutdown of Amp’d Mobile. Amp’d sort of aligned itself with Verizon Wireless, if you want to call owing the telecommunications giant some $54 million aligning. Its service functioned as a mobile virtual network operator piggybacking on Verizon Wireless’ network.
However, despite some programming successes — notably Lil’ Bush, which evolved into a series on Comedy Central — Amp’d may go the way of the Edsel as soon as July 31.
A couple of hours later, the word came that Crown Castle International pulled the plug on the mobile-TV service it had been testing in New York for four years, Modeo.
Unlike Qualcomm’s MediaFLO USA subsidiary — which locked up AT&T as a partner to carry live-TV channels, as well as Verizon Wireless — Modeo couldn’t get into the rodeo with the big players.
So, it seems that companies that don’t reach deals with the two major players in the wireless-phone industry won’t have long shelf lives.
Gee, I wonder which industry I’ve read that criticism about quite a few times in the pages of Multichannel News, not to mention on the pages of multichannel.com.
