November 14, 2005

This week, Cingular Wireless L.L.C. plans to launch a mobile radio service with more than three dozen channels of commercial-free streaming music.

MobiTV Inc. is powering the service, dubbed MobiRadio.

The service is available only on Nokia Corp.'s 6620 but soon will be supported by other handsets, Cingular said.

The operator is charging $7 a month in addition to data usage, and Cingular recommends radio subscribers sign on to one of its data plans. Those plans begin at $5 per month for 1 megabyte of data transmission.

Digital music provider Music Choice will program the channels, updating content regularly across a variety of genres. Music Choice also powers one of Sprint Nextel Corp.'s mobile music offerings.

The streaming-music service marks a first for Cingular, and builds on the carrier's relationship with the content provider.

Cingular launched MobiTV's live streaming video-service in January, and collaborated with the company to bring Major League Baseball audio broadcasts to Cingular users during the season.

"The mobile phone is a device that many people have with them all the time," said Jim Ryan, Cingular's vice president of consumer data services.

"We are excited to begin our foray into wireless radio with MobiTV's new service ... which gives our customers 44 channels of high quality music from which to choose."

Source: RCR News