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Radio service comes to mobile phones
By John Blau

Add streaming of radio entertainment and news programs to the growing list of services available to owners of new Internet-enabled mobile phones.

MSpot Inc. launched one of the world's first radio services for mobile phones, initially targeting Sprint PCS Vision customers, the Palo Alto, California, mobile media company said Monday in a statement.

The service, now available on select phones on the nationwide network of Sprint PCS, offers 13 channels of live and on-demand programming, including music, news, sports and weather. The content is delivered as a media stream over the mobile phone network to Internet-enabled phones equipped with a media player. It's available for US$5.95 per month.

Customers of Sprint PCS Vision, a unit of Sprint Corp., can preview and purchase MSpot Radio directly from their phones through the "available channels" menu located on the Sprint media player. Once customers have subscribed to the service, they can browse, select and play any of the MSpot channels through the media player.

MSpot, launched last year, aggregates audio and video entertainment from major media companies and adapts the content to mobile phones with its proprietary buffering and pixelation techniques.

The upstart plans to expand into video programming in the future, it said.

Numerous mobile phone operators now offer television programs as a streamed service.

Posted April 4, 2005 03:56 PM |