Last November, I wrote a piece about the likelihood that a lot of people will want to view video content over ipods and cell phones.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a piece that described the troubles of several new mobile media companies, including one involving ESPN.
While I continue to believe that an insufficient number of people will pay to watch large amounts of content on cell phones, I did not realize there is an additional wrinkle to these companies.
They are forming new mobile networks, using leased lines, to market their content. This seems incredibly risky. No wonder Mobile ESPN is having trouble.
These start-ups are betting they can lure users from current calling plans of Verizon or Cingular, for example, just to get the video content on the start-up network. I would have expected these firms to license their content to existing providers. Maybe, if they fail at their own networks, that's what they will revert to doing.
I have a feeling that the coming wave of mobile video is going to look an awfully lot like the first wave of internet retailing did in the late 1990s.
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