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January 4, 2012

The slowly-moving market for broadcast mobile TV got a boost today when MetroPCS announced that it will be the U.S.' first wireless provider to offer its subscribers the new service.

Metro PCS will start selling an Android-based Samsung phone later this year equipped with an ATSC chip, the hardware needed to receive mobile television signals in the United States.

The phone will be preloaded with the Dyle mobile TV app from Mobile Content Venture, a group of twelve major broadcast companies formed in 2011 to launch the country's first large-scale mobile television service.

"This new initiative allows Dyle to take the first step in realizing the broadcaster vision of live, local TV on every smartphone," Salil Dalvi and Erik Moreno, general managers for Mobile Content Venture, said in a joint statement.

MetroPCS didn't provide a specific launch date for the service or offer any pricing information for the new handset. Mobile Content Venture said that by the time the phone launches, its mobile television service will be available in 72 stations in 32 markets covering more than 52 percent of the U.S.' population.

The company didn't name specific markets, but its members had previously committed to launching service in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Tampa, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Orlando, Portland, Cincinnati, Greenville, West Palm Beach, Birmingham and Knoxville.

Mobile TV service in the U.S. has long been stymied by a great lack of stations transmitting the necessary ATSC signals and an inadequate supply of consumer electronics outfitted with the right chips for the technology.

A while back, Qualcomm tried to forge its own way with its now-defunct Flo TV mobile television offering but took the service off the air after it failed to gain traction with consumers. The spectrum used for Flo TV was sold to AT&T for $1.9 billion.

Mobile Content Venture's deal with MetroPCS could be a critical step in getting broadcast mobile TV off the ground. Wireless carriers are crucial distributors for mobile devices and relationships with the wireless industry are seen as an important stepping stone for the advancement of mobile television technology.

MetroPCS, Mobile Content Venture and Samsung all plan to demonstrate the new mobile television service at the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas next week.

In other mobile news

Apple has confirmed earlier this morning that its iPhone 4S device will start selling in China and in twenty-one other countries beginning next Friday, marking the increased global availability of its iconic phone.

The additional countries come at a time when Apple is trying to maintain its leadership position in the smartphone market even as Android has largely surpassed Apple's iOS and RIM's QNX OS in market share last March.

For now, the iPhone 4S still remains the single most popular smartphone, although scores of Android phones have proven to be worthy rivals, and Android continues to make strong inroads into the mobile phone market, not just in the U.S. but abroad as well.

Overall, the iPhone 4S will be key to Apple's fiscal first-quarter results, which come out on Jan. 24. The company missed iPhone expectations in the last period as consumers held off on buying an iPhone until the new model came out in October 2011.

Apple said at that time that it sold four million iPhone devices in the first three days after the launch of the 4S, which should help with its financial performance.

In addition to China, Apple will also expand into numerous smaller countries, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbados, Bolivia, Botswana, the British Virgin Islands, Cameroon, the Cayman Islands, the Central African Republic, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Grenada, Guam, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos, and finally, Uganda.

In other mobile news

There are reports that Research In Motion (RIM) is desperate to get rid of a huge inventory of its unpopular PlayBook tablets. Prices on all models in the U.S. have been slashed to $299 and they are still not selling.

You can now buy a 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB version of the tablet from the U.S. BlackBerry website at the reduced price. And, obviously, there's no point in opting for less memory when you can get one with the most memory for the same price.

On the 64 GB model, that gives a saving of $400 off the original expensive retail price of $699. And other retailers in the U.S. are still knocking down the prices even more.

Meanwhile, Amazon in the U.K. is offering the 16 GB model at £197.99, the 32 GB at £244.99 and the 64 GB at £339.90. The price-cutting in the U.S. is the latest attempt by RIM to clear massive stockpiles of the PlayBook, which has failed to spark any interest, even for the important Christmas and Holiday season.

Research In Motion took a $485 million charge at the end of its last quarter on the tablets, money it said it needed to increase promotional activity in order to "drive sell-through to end customers".

HP managed to ignite some interest in its beleaguered Touchpad when it dropped prices to rock bottom and introduced various promotional gimmicks to shift the tablets. Its Touchpad was slashed to $99 and finally started selling from day one, and now some wireless industry observers are saying that RIM should follow in HP's footsteps if it wants to rid itself of all that unwanted inventory.

So far, RIM has tried dropping prices and offering its PlayBooks on a buy-one-get-one-free basis, but it looks like the firm hasn't gone far enough yet to encourage anyone willing to buy a soon-to-be-discontinued item to pull out their wallets.

As of late yesterday, RIM had not returned a request for comment at the time of the publication of this story.

In other mobile news

Poynt is a new location-based (read GPS) search application, and its success is mainly attributed to the early support it received from Canadian-based smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM).

Poynt's early success at RIM allowed the company to build stronger relationships with wireless carriers and other handset makers, allowing its app to be preloaded on even more devices.

Last month, Poynt announced an agreement to have its app loaded on all Samsung devices-- a major coup for the company since the South Korean consumer electronics giant is the world's largest smartphone manufacturer.

Then a few days later, Nokia said it would load Poynt on its new Lumia Windows Phone devices in India. Poynt has now surpassed 12 million unique users and is adding about 20,000 to 30,000 new users everyday. The app is available on the BlackBerry, iOS, Android, Nokia QT, and Windows Phone platforms.

"You can expect to see some additional deals in the first quarter," said Margaret Campbell, senior vice president of marketing for Poynt.

Last July, half of its 700,000 new users came from a wireless carrier preload deal, Campbell said. Poynt offers suggestions on everything from restaurants to gas stations based on a person's location. The company gets a cut of revenue generated whenever someone buys a ticket to a movie theater listed on its app, or makes a reservation at a restaurant located through Poynt.

And very much like Groupon, it now sends offers based on GPS location. The company sees targeted, location-based advertisements as the key growth driver for the company.

"You're starting to see a few brands and some advertising agencies coming on board," Campbell said. "We're seeing an upswing in revenue there."

With the value of intellectual property at an all-time high and patent lawsuits flying around, Poynt is looking to make better use of its own patents, which relate to location-based services and the delivery of coupons and offers to mobile devices.

The company is looking at potential licensing opportunities, and may even turn to litigation down the line. Campbell said Poynt's success can be attributed to the company's focus on building apps for specific phones and platforms, as opposed to porting one app to every device.

"If you want to be successful at any platform, you have to look at how to integrate it into that device," she said. "Look at who the audience is."

But RIM, which has run into a whole slew of major issues in the past few months, including the delay of its next-generation BlackBerrys, Campbell says she isn't too worried about the future of the company.

But now the wireless carrier will soon make some customers pay for the "privilege" of paying their bills.

The U.S.' largest wireless services provider is instituting a $2 "convenience charge" for those customers who make one-time bill payments using a debit or credit card, either online or by telephone. Like it or not, the new extra fee will go into effect on January 15, 2012.

There are now three ways for customers to avoid the charge: Customers can make a one-time payment using an electronic check, they can pay their bill using their home banking accounts, or they can use a Verizon gift card or rebate card.

Otherwise, single telephone and even online payments will incur a $2 extra fee. "The charge will help allow us to continue to support these single bill payment options and is designed to address costs incurred by us for only those customers who choose to make single bill payments," the company said in a statement.

Verizon customers can still enroll in a service that will debit their bank accounts or charge their credit cards on a recurring basis for free. They can also show up at a Verizon store to pay without incurring the fee, and they can mail checks to the company.

But it's still not clear how many of Verizon's 91 million mobile customers will be affected by the new charge. As of this morning, a company spokesman from Verizon didn't reply to a request for comment we've sent them yesterday.

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Source: Metro PCS Communications.

    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.