Having been a couch potato since the heyday of Saturday morning TV cartoons, I was primed and ready to love Verizon Wireless's VCast service and MobiTV (via Sprint). But both services left me more
amazed with the technical feat of mobile TV than satisfied with having Bill O'Reilly and Elmo in my pocket.
Verizon's high-speed EV-DO network gives the downloadable VCast clips incredibly
crisp detail and pause-free performance, but you have to wait quite a while for the content to boot up and buffer. VCast boasts a decent programming lineup, ranging from hourly CNNtoGo updates and E!
star gossip to "Sesame Street" shorts and "mobisodes" from Fox TV's made-for-mobile show. It's not clear how often non-news content gets refreshed, and the media channels
represented remain fairly narrow more than six months into a $15-a-month service.
The service is a fun extra, but I'm feeling a bit ripped off now that I've already shown it to all my
friends.
MobiTV uses a streaming approach, which enables users to drop into either live feeds from cable channels like MSNBC, or condensed branded programming that recycles in shorter
loops. Compared to VCast, the diverse 25-plus channel mix is a bargain at $10 a month. Regardless, the streaming approach means that you never know what you are dropping into -- an ad break, the end
of a segment, or something you really want to watch in the few minutes you have to spare. While content load and buffering times have improved in the last six months on Sprint's 2.5G network, lengthy
pauses and pixilation get irritating.
Bottom line: Like a GE TV circa 1950, mobile video is promising, but we won't get better reception until the tubes fully warm up.