14 DAY TRIAL // According to moconews, Orange and 3 content supplier MobiTV has closed its office in the UK and is aiming to concentrate on the US market only.
Apparently, this isn't the last you've heard of MobiTV in Europe; a spokesman from the company has announced that it will be "opening a research centre in Sweden and aren't leaving Europe". Orange will also continue to work with MobiTV as an aggregation partner, although that is subject to change in the future.
On the other hand, according to New Media Age, the company has 'closed down its aggregation service with 3 and will no longer provide its downloadable TV Java application to Orange.'
Now there are definitely two sides of the coin in this case. While mobile TV is constantly increasing in popularity, it is somewhat odd for MobiTV to be pulled out of the UK.
As a contrast, even though struggling many times to push it forward, companies haven't so far managed to convince customers from UK of the benefits of mobile TV. Virgin Mobile is proof for the fact that even though advertising a product as much as possible, they've still managed to sell an embarrassing number of Lobster phones and have gained very few subscribers for their mobile TV service.
In North America, MobiTV is on quite a few carriers. MobiTV is said to have passed the two-million subscribers mark with most of them living in the US. The MobiTV rooster of channels in the US includes MSNBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, Fox Sports, ESPN, CNBC, and CSPAN, all of them channels that Orange and 3 customers from the UK will be missing in the future.