Well, the Beijing Olympics has start and while I’m in the US watching, I have been glued to the TV watching some of my favorite sports and also paying particular attention to the advertisements. One in particular is the AT&T commercial (below) for their mobile video service. For Americans who love to watch sports where USA is competing, NBC and AT&T working to provide coverage through TV, your computer and even your mobile phone.
But looking at the coverage availability on the AT&T website and also based on my experience with the LG Vu in San Francisco, I am not able to use the Mobile Video function. With nearly 100 Olympic Athletes hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, I guess I cannot be out and about while watching Michael Phelps breaking records and cement his legacy in Swimming.
I feel that AT&T simply ran out of time to effectively deploy this service to enough markets in time for the Olympics. NBC has definitely held up their end of the bargain as NBC Olympics with an amazing site with tons of streaming video coverage. If anyone *has* been able to use the AT&T Mobile Video service for the Olympics, I’d be curious about the quality and ease of use.
This reminds me a few years ago when I was in Germany during the World Cup in 2006. Mobile Video and IPTV was heavily advertised and subscriptions were selling like hotcakes. But the end result was that it became oversubscribed and the quality was extremely jerky video. Key clips showing critical goals, penalty shots and corner shots were the angst and ire of many viewers, not because of the end result, but because of not being able to see it. It’s not the same here since Mobile Video is quite new and available on fewer phones, but this seems like a classic problem of the marketing and deployment teams not working together enough to service potential demand for these new data services. This is hard stuff to deploy new data services! It doesn’t help that the Marketing of these services are certainly getting better!
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