• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 3, 2005

NEWS ITEM: Sprint Launches Live TV Service to Mobile Phones

With 50-inch plasma HDTVs tumbling in price practically by the hour (yes, I am coiled to strike at the right price, much to my wife's chagrin), I am hard-pressed to understand why anyone would want to watch TV on a screen that is not even the size of a business card. Well, it's not really the 300 or so channels you can get from your overpriced cable service, but rather content from just 19 providers, including the ever-compelling Learning Channel and C-SPAN.

Ruling out trips to the bathroom, the dead-tree media industry's' last line of defense--cell TV--doesn't seem quite right for the home, so we have to assume that it will be worth 10 bucks a month to watch TV in public. As if there is a place you can go in public anymore that doesn't already have a TV--always, it seems, on the wrong channel and too loud. Now, along with the morons who think their cell conversations are interesting to everyone nearby, we will have to unwillingly "share" the cell TV experience. Or, attached to their tiny TVs by earphones, these viewers will join the iPod dawn of the dead--shuffling about, too consumed by programming they'd likely not even watch at home to engage in anything approaching civilized intercourse with the rest of society.

Already, Americans spend more time using media devices--TV, radio, computers, mobile phones, and MP3 players--than doing anything else while awake, at least according to Ball State University's Center for Media Design. Cell TV will only add to the nine hours a day the average person spends using some type of media. And we wonder why conversation is a lost art.

Worse still, cell TV will be one more reason for our citizenry to get their news from places like Fox instead of news organizations with less bias, and which don't have to rely on video footage for an event to be considered newsworthy. If you followed the coverage of the hurricanes on both TV and in newspapers and the newsweeklies, you realize how pathetic and misleading most of the TV reporting was compared to reports from the dead-tree guys (although that Campbell Brown is pretty cute).

And what happens when you can no longer keep cell TV a secret from your kids? Just as they now think any car without a DVD player is a junk heap, they will decide that the cell phones they totally do not need in the first place HAVE to have TV, or their lives will be incomplete. No matter that they will be racking up minutes on your cell plan. Cell phone TV will become a perceived birthright like PS2 and an iPod--no mini, no nano! Meanwhile, they will further withdraw from face-to-face contact with you, until you have to send them a text message or an e-mail that it is time for dinner.

I suppose IF cell TV can gets the rights to MLB and IF the Yankees make it to the Series and it is the 7th game and IF I can't find a real TV, that it might be worth watching tiny, tiny Bernie Williams and itsy-bitsy Randy Johnson outplay their infinitesimally small opponents on cell TV. Although those rotating virtual ads on the wall behind the plate will be REALLY hard to see.