Despite a huge marketing campaign and an innovative product mobile phone buyers in the UK have failed to be won over by Virgin Mobile Lobster.
The service, which was launched last October, was the UK’s first broadcast TV service for mobile phones and was pushed hard by Pamela Anderson and a multi million advertising budget.
Apparently less than 10,000 users have signed up to the service despite price cuts on PAYG and free phones with £25 a month contract deals.
Most operators still believe mobile TV faces a rosy future even after several false starts. Vodafone, 3 and Orange have been pushing the service over 3G networks but this is limited by bandwidth constraints. Virgin were using a broadcast technology similar to the way conventional TV signals are sent to bypass the bandwidth issues.
Virgin Mobile TV was backed by BT and gave users access to BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4, E4 and ITN news.
Virgin Mobile blamed the slow take up rate on unfashionable handsets, stating:
Handsets are a fashion device and become unfashionable fairly rapidly and this one is approaching the end of its cycle.
They hope to launch a new range of handsets later this year with the capability to store footage for viewing later in areas with no reception such as the London Underground.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
If the price per megabyte of data transfer went down then people would be willing to try mobile television. At the moment it’s far too expensive for anyone to take notice.
Indeed, Warza, GPRS charges in the UK are just a rip-off. But hope is at hand! FreeBe TV is free mobile TV. No subscription fee and globally available. Just make sure you have a GPRS bundle in your mobile tariff if you live in the UK. Meanwhile, some 130,000 people worldwide are already watching it for free.
very nice hand set
virgin has a flat rate of 0.5p per kb,,and they expect ppl to receive tv streams at that price! virgin is a joke. highly inflated prices on anything other than uk only calls and standard text messages