MediaFLO and Verizon are touting the availability of more than 100 live and full-length college football games on the V CAST Mobile TV service. The games will be spread across a number of channels: CBS Mobile, ESPN Mobile TV, FOX Mobile and NBC 2Go, with programmers choosing which games to cover based on team performances the previous week. The release has a list of some of the first games broadcast. Mobile ESPN offered college sports streamed to its customers, but the service was only live for a couple of weeks before Disney closed the MVNO, notes Red Herring. Sports are also seen as a promising driver for mobile TV—there’s lots of events that people would prefer to watch in real time rather than time-shift, and fans are used to spending a fair bit of money on their passion. Sports is the subject most browsed by males and European women on the mobile internet in both Europe and the US, according to M:Metrics. “The nice thing about sports is that they have schedules and they are not subject to the random interests of the market, so if you are going to break mobile TV out of the gate, sports is a good place to start,” said John Gauntt, an analyst with eMarketer. Guantt goes on to flaunt the advertising possibilities of mobile TV, arguing that “it’s the perfect venue for a combination of both brand and direct response marketing...Unlike TV, people’s attention is engaged on that little screen and that’s what excites marketers”.

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