Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are actually watching long episodes and sometimes complete films, so a growing number of media companies are vying for people’s mobile attention spans. The mobile video audience is tiny today, but a range of companies, from Hollywood studios to local TV stations, all foresee an increasingly wireless world — and they don’t want to be cut out of the picture.
Joining the wireless equivalent of a land rush, last month some of the biggest local TV station owners in the United States announced a joint venture to transmit their content to viewers on the go. It is most likely years away from operation. The stations would transmit to phones over the airwaves, much like Flo TV, a unit of Qualcomm, which has invested about $1 billion in mobile video distribution. The service sends channels like ESPN, Fox News and MTV to phones.
Later this year, Bitbop, a product of the News Corporation’s Fox Mobile Group, will stream TV episodes to smartphones for $9.99 a month. Blockbuster, the beleaguered movie rental chain, started selling movies for phones in the last month.
While the audience for mobile TV is small at the moment, it is growing rapidly. Roughly 17.6 million people in the United States watched video on their phones in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the Nielsen Company, up from 11.2 million 12 months earlier. They watched an average of three hours and 37 minutes of mobile video a month. By way of comparison, Americans who watch television watch on average 153 hours of traditional TV a month.
Read more at the New York Times.
