High-speed wireless data reaching cell phones

Veteran research analyst David Chamberlain isn't easily hyped when it comes to new technologies.

But watching television on his mobile phone, a service being launched today in Colorado by Verizon, has him hooked.

Cell phone in hand, Chamberlain walks each morning to his office in Phoenix, watching two-minute clips from "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.

When an airplane crashed earlier this month in Toronto, where some of Chamberlain's friends were traveling, he downloaded video updates every hour from MSNBC and watched them on his cell phone.

"It's just like looking at a small TV," said Chamberlain. "I've seen a lot of early technology, but this really amazed me."

Verizon, Sprint and Cingular are all racing to build out their high-speed wireless data networks in Denver and other U.S. cities for transmitting TV and high-speed Internet to cell phones. Verizon launched mobile TV in January in 50 markets, including Phoenix.

Verizon's V Cast service costs $15 per month, with three-dimensional games, NASCAR clips and other premium content costing $1 to $3 per download.

Sprint, which is resold by Qwest, hopes to have the service in Denver by October while Cingular has yet to announce its launch date.

As the mobile phone market in the U.S. becomes saturated, carriers are hoping to boost their bottom line with mobile TV and other data products. Manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung, meanwhile, are responding with cell phones that offer stereo-like sound and lush display panels.

Data, such as text messaging and music downloads, already accounts for 10 percent of Sprint's mobile phone revenue. Chamberlain, an analyst with the In-Stat research firm, estimates mobile TV subscribers in the U.S. will increase from 1.1 million by the end of this year to 30 million in 2010.

But others are skeptical.

"Video on handheld devices has significant hurdles to overcome," wrote Jeffrey Halpern, a Sanford Bernstein analyst, in a recent research note. Those hurdles include billing challenges and the struggle to shrink TV broadcasts to fit on a tiny phone panel.