Sprint Cellcasting

Sprint Cellcasting NFL, Looses 3rd Quarter

Posted by Sam Churchill on November 7th, 2008

Yesterday, a National Football League game — the Cleveland Browns vs. the Denver Broncos — was broadcast on Sprint mobile phones as part of an exclusive partnership with Sprint, a deal that’s valued about $500 million over five years, reports the WSJ.

Over the next seven weeks, Sprint will phone-cast the eight games that are televised solely on the NFL Network, the league’s cable channel. For the past three seasons, the NFL has struggled to persuade major cable operators to include its channel in their basic programming packages.

“Live compelling content is a game changer in the mobile industry,” said Steve Gaffney, Sprint’s director of sports sponsorships.

For the NFL, the Sprint phone-casts are part of a series of experiments with digital media aimed at determining how fans will consume football in the future. NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., conducted similar experiments this summer, showing highlights and a handful of events from the Beijing Olympics on mobile phones.

For Mobile Television, Sprint has eschewed Qualcomm’s MediaFlo, a 700 MHz broadcast channel dedicated to cell phones on UHF Channel 56, used by Verizon and AT&T. Instead, Sprint uses their EVDO data network with MobiTV delivering content over their EVDO data network.

NextWave Wireless plans to give WiMAX operators the ability to deliver mobile TV and digital audio over their networks. Their MXtv technology is compatible with the 802.16e standard. NextWave also has a joint development agreement with Huawei to integrate MXtv into their WiMAX products.

In other news, Sprint Nextel reported a third-quarter loss of $326 million and a double-digit drop in revenue today. This compares with earnings of $64 million, or 2 cents a share, last year. Revenue for the quarter was $8.8 billion, down from $10 billion last year.

Sprint Nextel’s wireless business reported a 13 percent decline in revenue to $7.5 billion as its subscriber base fell by 1.3 million. That included 1.1 million valuable “postpaid” customers who have contracts. That was worse than in the second quarter, when Sprint Nextel lost 901,000 subscribers, including 776,000 postpaid customers.

source : dailywireless.org