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Aug. 5, 2008

Mobi-TV now claims that it has passed the 4 million subscribers' mark.

The company says over 1 million new users signed up since October 2007.

MobiTV was formed in 1999 and began offering TV service for handsets about five years ago.

Currently, most of the TV content is clipped and edited versions of standard TV shows, although MobiTV also offers mobile-targeted content as well as some interactive features.

The paid service works on select devices from Alltel, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Telus.

MobiTV officials say there are more than fifty channels available for now.

As could be expected, the challenges of putting real and full TV shows on a device as small as a mobile handset are numerous.

The shortest TV shows are typically thirty minutes long, which means that many 'consumable' minutes and average handset battery life can be depleted fairly rapidly depending on the way the handset is used.

In most cases, high-quality video is typically a big bandwidth consumer and, to make matters worse, most mobile phones simply lack the level of sound quality that viewers typically expect from watching "regular" television.

Nevertheless, MobiTV added that it is seeing a fairly large increase in unique daily users and viewing time.

However, no other forecasts were disclosed for other subscriber metrics done at MobiTV.

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Source: Mobi-TV.