MobiTV

» see mobitv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

MobiTV started life in 1999 as Idetic, a Bay Area company with no obvious product, and found one in the least promising place available: video on a phone that could not do video. In November 2003 it launched on Sprint as Sprint TV, ten dollars a month for a handful of live channels streamed to a handset with a screen you could cover with a thumb. The picture was small and the frame rate was a rumor. People paid anyway.

Within three years it was the plumbing behind mobile television at Sprint, Cingular, AT&T and T-Mobile, plus Alltel and Telcel in Mexico. That is a strange kind of success. Nobody bought MobiTV, they bought their carrier's TV product, and MobiTV was the company that made the carrier's TV product exist. Being invisible infrastructure paid the bills for a decade and then made the company impossible to explain to anyone considering buying it.

The iPhone arrived in 2007 and, over the following five years, quietly removed the reason for MobiTV's existence. If the phone had a browser and an app store, a broadcaster could reach it directly and did not need a middleman holding carrier deals. MobiTV pivoted to selling white label video systems to small cable operators, kept going for another decade on that, and filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on 1 March 2021 listing more liabilities than assets.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ ten dollars a month ~

The 2003 service is worth remembering precisely because it was bad. Video ran at a few frames per second over a 2.5G network that had not been designed with any of this in mind, and the compression made faces into weather. What it had instead of quality was the thing streaming spent the next fifteen years rediscovering: it was live and there was nothing to install.

None of this reached Turkey on those terms. Turkish carriers were still selling WAP by the kilobyte in 2003, and a monthly video subscription on top of a mobile bill would have been an absurd proposition at the prices of the time. Mobile TV arrived here later, over 3G, and by then it was an operator add-on rather than anybody's flagship.

~ the pivot nobody watched ~

The second MobiTV is the less famous one and it lasted longer than the first. From roughly 2013 the company sold a managed IPTV platform that let a regional cable operator with forty thousand subscribers offer an app and a set top experience it could never have built itself. That business was real, and the customer list was full of names most people have never heard of.

It was also a business with thin margins and customers who were themselves losing subscribers to Netflix every quarter. By early 2021 MobiTV had missed payments, lost its financing and run out of the ability to keep the platform running while it looked for a buyer.

~ the auction ~

The sale ran in May 2021 and was closer than the outcome suggests. TiVo, by then part of Xperi, bid 18.5 million dollars including 17.4 million in cash. Against it stood a combined offer of about 18 million. Roku was in that group, alongside the patent licensor RPX and the set top vendor Amino Technologies, each of which wanted a different piece. The court approved the TiVo bid on 21 May.

mobitv.com now serves a redirect to a TiVo product page for managed IPTV, which is roughly what the assets became. Twenty-two years of a company that was first to something enormous ended as a line item in a set top box vendor's catalog, and the founders' original bet was correct in every respect except who would get paid for it.

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