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SmartPhoneToday surveys this week's developments in the wireless industry's ongoing attempt to capture more of your dollars through mobile entertainment—particularly the roll out of a variety of handset TV and video services.

Case in point, Cingular Wireless launched MobiTV, a television network for mobile handsets, this week. With MobiTV, you can watch live news, sports and entertainment programming on 22 channels, including MSNBC, CNBC, ABC News Now, NBC Mobile, FOX Sports, Discovery, TLC, C-SPAN, and other music, sports, fashion, and comedy channels.

Cingular Subscribers access the service through the Nokia 6620, Motorola V3 (RAZR), Motorola V220, Motorola V180, and soon on the Motorola V400 and V600 phones. Back in October, AT&T Wireless (now a part of Cingular) introduced MobiTV for its mMode customers.

The fee for MobiTV is $9.99 per month.

Not to be outdone, Cingular competitor Verizon Wireless announced the delivery of its own new 15 frames per second video-on-demand offering.

PacketVideo supplies the Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio compatible media player for the service, called V CAST. It integrates a catalog that lets users browse, buy, and view content from their handset.

Verizon will offer V CAST on its high-speed 3G EV-DO network beginning February 1st. It'll cost $15 per month, and can be used with the LG VX8000, Samsung SCH-a890, and UTStarcom CDM-8940 phones.

More Phon-E-rtainment

Sorrent became the exclusive publisher of mobile games and content for some upcoming Twentieth Century Fox films, beginning with the computer animated feature film, Robots. Other movies in the deal include Kingdom of Heaven, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Ice Age 2: The Meltdown.

Mobile content provider The Mobile Media Company acquired game developer MindX to integrate MindX's interactive crossword puzzle and quiz games into its wireless offerings. It also partnered with SmarTone to deliver its 3G multiplayer games to that company's customers, and inked a deal with Rubberduck Media Lab to deliver live, streaming TV to mobile channels and wireless devices worldwide.

Children's entertainment company DIC Entertainment plans to work with SmartVideo Technologies to create DIC Kid's Network—an animation channel for mobile handsets.


(From DIC Web Site)

DIC owns over 3,200 half-hours of programming and 100 shows, including Inspector Gadget, Madeline, Sabrina, Liberty's Kids, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, and Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?

SmartVideo's asserts its technology recreates a television experience, even over low bandwidth connections, for cell phones and smartphones.

Games publisher IN-FUSIO acquired U.S. based Thumbworks, a publisher of entertainment applications for mobile phones. In addition to expanding IN-FUSIO's North Amercian presence, the company says the merger seeks to accelerate the creation of applications designed to increase user loyalty, players' community activity, and broadens the international distribution channel for licensors.

OnVerge Labs ported InfiniFile ($39.95)—an application that provides access to audio, video, programs, and data stored on a PC from a wireless PDA or smartphone—to the Palm platform.

The company says the amount of storage and the size of files accessible on the device are limited only by the available space on a user's PC. Also, end-users can, for instance, use any popular media player to listen to any audio and watch any video file on a desktop computer in real time.

You can leverage the application in the enterprise to share spreadsheets, documents, presentations and databases between multiple users with familiar personal organization, business productivity, ERP, and enterprise Palm O applications.

The server program, InfiniServer, is free.

M7 Networks worked with Gameeloft to make that company's Block Breaker Deluxe available in The Game Lobby from Sprint. Block Breaker Deluxe is a twist on the traditional wall breaker arcade classic.