• by Shankar Gupta , March 15, 2006

One of the biggest providers of TV content to mobile devices, MobiTV, streams programming from MSNBC, ABC News Now, CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, ESPN 3GTV, MLB, NBC Mobile, CNBC, C-SPAN, The Discovery Channel, TLC, The Weather Channel, and others to cell phones.

MobiTV's goal is to make the mobile TV experience as comfortable and accessible for consumers as sitting at home watching TV.

"When you open it up, you start watching -- it's like turning on your TV," says Paul Scanlan, the firm's chief operations officer. "When we launched MobiTV, one of our big initiatives was to replicate the TV-watching experience people are familiar with at home."

MobiTV inserts its own ads during commercial breaks in programming, but has some advertisers giving the medium a try. Video ads on MobiTV can be interactive, allowing users to click through directly to a product or a Web page.

Advertisers like Daimler-Chrysler's Jeep brand and Unilever's Axe have created their own mobile content channels. Jeep hosted content based on its interactive family "The Mudds" on a MobiTV channel, telling the story of an outdoorsy family that uses its Jeep to get from adventure to adventure. Axe ran commercials on a dedicated Axe channel.

"We can certainly sell just the inventory, but we're more interested in advertisers who can experiment with the cutting-edge capabilities we have," Scanlan says.