vodafone only has a 6 month exclusive contract with skytv for mobile tv

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stacey1122

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Topic # 12042 24-Feb-2007 17:21

did u know vodafone only has a 6 month exclusive contract with skytv for mobile tv? i read it in a new zealand herald paper a few weeks ago. they said telecom are looking forward to offer it once vodafone's exclusive contract is up. finally a competitor. hopefully we will see a reduced price or promotion like 10minutes free viewing or something.it'll probably be a small one,but better than nothing. hopefully telecom will go one step further than vodafone and offer all of skytv's digital channels as well as free to air channels,which vodafone doesn't have.

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Reply # 61853 24-Feb-2007 17:49

Out of curiosity what is your facination with mobile TV? You have posted numerous things about this in the past.

Personally I think Vodafone's MobileTV is a waste of time - it's something that might come in handy if you're bored but at the end of the day for Mobile TV to take off it needs to be content people want and to be live. People might watch Shortland St on their mobile if it was streamed live however they aren't going to intentionally sit down and watch disconvery channel on their mobile when they have no idea at all what's on.

It's not surprising mobile operators are strugging to find a market for a product when they launch a product in the marketplace that most people find to be a yawn. American operators seem to be loving the TV market when they're streaming numerous channels live, something Vodafone NZ need to do here if they want people to become interested in the product. Vodafone made such a big deal about it being "Sky TV" and plenty of people thought they were going to see live streaming Sky TV channels on their mobile only to be disapointed in what was actually on offer.

paradoxsm

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Reply # 61856 24-Feb-2007 18:42

Groan alright..... all the channels turned out to be "Trailers" and "highlights"and "selected content"... and the network could not keep up when I tried it, The link expire (no bookmarking, same with all the horrible Vodafone live portal content) and overall a shoddy experience. it seemed to bomb out every 15 mins and I tried to reconnect but the "media link" had of course expired...

Telecom's mobile TV aint any better either... and far too overpriced. no-one will pay $1.50 for a 3 min music video! 50c maybe but $1.50... no. the selection menu when it was free was intuitive, now it's a complex wap based thing.

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Reply # 61859 24-Feb-2007 19:05

Until we have a service such as MobiTV here in New Zealand, everything else is just video clips - boring, old stuff. Of course not on the interest of any of the local mobile operators to have such a service - first because it is something that's actually good, and we know the local operators are reluctant to bring any good stuff, really.

Second because it generates traffic, and users will only subscribe if we have those "unlimited" bundles they have in the U.S., but clearly neither Vodafone NZ or Telecom NZ have any intention of offering "unlimited" plans, because if they wanted we would have them already.

So until them, any "mobile TV" is only a glimpse of the whole thing, nothing more than a gimmick.

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simon14

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Reply # 61884 25-Feb-2007 11:13

paradoxsm: all the channels turned out to be "Trailers" and "highlights"and "selected content"...

All channels ay? CNN is a live stream 24/7, only about 4 seconds behind the CNN broadcasted on TV.

While i think SkyMovies trailers and Descovery channels could be better, i'm finding the service very good. I quite often turn on SkyNews to catch up on the latests news headlines and had CNN on for 2 hours the other day while i was cooking dinner, phone got very warm!!

I just wish Vodafone had streaming music.... that would be cool.

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Reply # 61901 25-Feb-2007 17:54

I'd love to know why they chose to stream CNN live but only run the ~5 min looped news updates from Sky News. To me it would have been cool to have Sky news streamed live as well as the podcast style looped package as another channel. This can be very infrequently updated (sometimes twice per day) whereas the live product is quite good. CNN is a bit of a yawn these days unless something exciting is happening in the world and they have live coverage.

Vodafone Australia seemed to at least have a basic understanding of delivering a usable product to the market - 21 channels in total, 6 are live (ABC, SBS, BBC World, Sky News Business, Sky News UK and Fashion TV) and then 6 different Sky News mobile looped packages (Sport, Weather, Headlines, Now, Showbiz & Top Stories)

It's as though Vodafone don't really want people to use the product, it simply adds to the conspiracy theories about their limited network capacity and backhaul for IP traffic.

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Reply # 61910 25-Feb-2007 19:27

Maybe they do have limited capacity.

I was wanting to watch Prime News at 5 :30 tonight and just before it started, my phone said "Lost Connection", then i coudln't get back on. I had full 3g coverage so my thinking is that the network was too busy at that time.

It is quite limited but it is a good start, I think if they launched tv1, 2 and 3 streamed live, this would increase it's usage by far.

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Reply # 61927 26-Feb-2007 00:19

Once they start offering things like live sport on Vodafone, then people might start picking up on it. Something like 3 mobile had in Aus where you paid ten bucks or whatever it was to watch all cricket on your mobile would be a good selling point for me.

Currently i'm on Telecom, with a phone that can take, yet not receive video, so can't comment on Vodafone's offerings.

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Reply # 61936 26-Feb-2007 09:16

Sounds like you want full control of your content ...

Download ORB, install a TV tuner with video in for you computer, hook the video in into your sky box

Purchase a 1GB data plan, your off laughing all your mp3s and sky channels automagically streamed in 3gp

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Reply # 61943 26-Feb-2007 09:53

Filterer: Purchase a 1GB data plan, your off laughing all your mp3s and sky channels automagically streamed in 3gp

Yeah, that would be great but how much of the 1GB is going to be chewed up if you watch TV for an hour?

I guess there is very heavy compression used, and it's a pretty small screen, but over time, the amount of data must add up to quite a substantial amount. Any ideas roughly how much per hour is used?

Filterer

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Reply # 61945 26-Feb-2007 10:07

Don't know but you would get 700 mins of mp3s at 192kb

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Reply # 61949 26-Feb-2007 10:31

Hi All,

I'm not sure what the problem is here - the service does what it says on the box. And, to be frank, it's a service that customers are lapping up - 10,000 customers a day are using the service after only a couple of weeks of service.

As for price, I have to say I think $2.50 for EIGHT channels of content is pretty good going. How much do you think is reasonable? I'd pay that just for news content alone so I can catch up on stuff while sitting on the bus/waiting for the GP etc. The Cartoon Network would come a close second - to get the rest essentially for free is just a bonus for me.

It's not a service for everybody. My dad isn't going to sign on to it - he wouldn't see the value in it at all. But anyone who commutes or has regular amounts of downtime that's too short to get some work done but too long to just stare at the wall will find it of use I would think.

Cheers

Paul Brislen
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freitasm

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Reply # 61950 26-Feb-2007 10:46

AS I posted before, I would be attracted to a service such as MobiTV, where I have a much bigger selection of live TV and no restrictions as to which handset to use. But the sesvice falls outside the walled garden Vodafone tries to keep their users on, and seriously, 1GB data is not even the start for some TV over cellular packet usage.

Also, Orb is a good experience. If the user can setup the thing (which is very easy). Another option is a SlingBox, which might be coming here sometime - who knows. Both are "place shift" technologies and work well over cellular.

Again, those services work (most) with Palm, Windows Mobile and J2ME feature phones. But Vodafone wants to control everything and limit the options for the users. In a point I agree it reduces the amount of support required, but is this good?

Yes, some users might be happy with a walled garden, but they don't know better.

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Reply # 61951 26-Feb-2007 10:53

I think there's a difference between downloading full streaming TV to watch on the big set in the lounge (or even on your laptop) and wanting something to fill in ten minutes while you're waiting for the GP to call your name. There's a definite market for both - at the moment we're working with SKY TV and the plan we're offering is what, three weeks old? The customer response has been huge and we're keen to build on that (as is SKY) so while I can understand the desire to have everything and to have it now, we have to work our way up to that.

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Paul Brislen

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Jama

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Reply # 61958 26-Feb-2007 11:58

10,000 out of about 2M customers represents .5% take up. Not that stunning. Yes you might have 10,000 customers a day using the service but what is the user feedback? If a number of them are having a bad experience they will not be back.

Vodafone showed of DVB-H in 2005 so what technology are they using in NZ? If they are simply streaming TV to the handset using mpeg4 then it is not a good technology and the overhead on the data network is extreme.

A cluster of mobile TV watchers will have a downstream impact on mobile data users. Which customer is worth more money?

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Reply # 61968 26-Feb-2007 12:39

Hi Jama,

Surely 10,000 customers a day is a good indication of the service being well received. It's only available to 3G handsets in 3G coverage areas so your 2 million figure is a tad off beam as well (and no, I'm not going to tell you how many 3G customers we've got). The service works (try it out - it's only $2.50 a week) and is bags of fun and the feedback we've been getting is that not only do the customers like it, they want more.

What more can you ask of a new product?

Cheers

Paul Brislen

Vodafone External Communications Manager

Paul Brislen
Head of Corporate Communications
Vodafone

http://forum.vodafone.co.nz

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