TV On Your Phone?

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a market research study related to TV service delivered over cell phones. I've never done anything like this before, but I love gadgets. When you throw in the fact that they provided the phone and I got to keep it after the study was done, what was there to lose? That would be enough to get most people to do it, but they also paid a small fee to boot. It was almost too good to be true, but this company bought me a new phone and paid me to use it!

So for an eight week period, I was supposed to "use the service as much as possible" and log my viewing on their web site. This wasn't a big deal, but I did find myself some days thinking, "I haven't watched anything yet. I better take a quick peak and log it on the web site." I only missed one day in the eight weeks so I felt like I held up my end of the bargain.

However, based on these eight weeks, I have to ask, "Do we really need TV on our cell phones?" I settled on a pretty solid "no". Outside of the trial, it costs an extra $10 a month. That in of itself is a deal breaker. For $5 a month, I might consider it, but that's even iffy. However what they had to offer as "service" was really nothing to write home about. There were eight channels in all, but I was only interested in about half of them - Fox, NBC, ESPN, and Comedy Central. Yet, these were not the "real" channels that you would see on your TV at home. Occasionally they would show the same programming, but most of the time what I saw seemed to have no rhyme or reason to it. ESPN often showed the same program every hour - boring! I usually only watched for about 5 minutes most of the time anyway. Finally, the reception was average to poor. I watched a few minutes of a Stanly Cup Playoff game, but I never did find the puck.

Even though I didn't care for the service, it was still kind of fun to play with one of the latest and greatest toys. After it the study was over, I used the money they paid me to get a phone that was more to my liking. Now I'm going to try to figure out the best way to sell the "TV phone". The main thing I need to do is figure out how to wipe all of my information out of the phone and get it back to the factory default state. All in all, I say it was a good deal.

Until next time...
PH