Oak Investment Partners Throws Away $70 Million on MobiTV
Over the last few years, I’ve watched the development of the Slingbox and Orb with great interest. Being able to watch TV on the go through a cell phone, laptop or PDA is really cool, but in all honesty I don’t spend enough time on the go to justify paying the wireless access charges on my phone for the service, especially considering that my Audiovox phone already supports a video library that I can snyc on my phone in my downtime.
While I’m probably not your typical placeshifter, I do still find the technology very exciting and I’m glad that there are companies out there that aren’t afraid to risk the wrath of the Hollywood fat cats to provide consumers with access to programming that we’ve already legitimately paid for.
At some point, as the popularity of placeshifting grows, I expect that we’ll see the content and cellular providers go head to head with Sling Media and Orb on the functionality they allow, but for the time being these companies have set the gold standard when it comes to expanding consumer’s fair use rights and would be my first choice if I was going to adopt placeshifting.
With as much money at stake, I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise to see that the cell phone providers aren’t accepting placeshifting lying down, but I continue to scratch my head at the dilluted offerings that are being presented to consumers.
MobiTV is one of these offerings that has received broad support from the cellular industries as well as a number of wealthy venture capitalists. According to GigaOm, the company has actually just received another staggering $70 million dollars from Oak Investment Partners to support their version of what they think consumers want.
Basically MobiTV allows you to receive East coast broadcast television feeds live on your cell phone. While on the surface this sounds like something that consumers might like, it’s a huge downgrade for those used to being able to access any channel, not just the ones MobiTV has partnered with or for those who want to actually time shift their programming instead of watching it live. Given that MobiTV is trying to charge $10 per month, on top of the $20 per month that the cellular company is going to charge for unlimited data transfers, this seems like a really weak service to be offering to consumers compared to the anything at anytime business model of Sling Media and Orb. While it’s nice that MobiTV is trying to work with content providers to provide TV on the go, there is no way I’d ever pay that much money to not have time shifting capabilities despite how much content partners seem to hate the PVR.
Posted on July 12th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Slingbox