Movies, Movies Everywhere

Joseph Laszlo | September 07, 2006, 01:06 PM

Even before consumers have totally gotten adjusted to the idea of watching full-length movies on their PCs, Sprint's gone ahead and launched full-length movies on mobile phones.

Launch titles will include Spiderman 2, National Treasure, and Scarface, pricing will be $4-$6 for unlimited viewing over a fixed period of time (which will vary from title to title).

I suppose this works as a proof of concept, but as a business? It's useless and bad. If any kind of video works on cellphones, it's short, timely, and short. And if I could add one more quality, it should really be short.

Alana Muller, director of entertainment product marketing for Sprint said, "For example, customers can take their mind off a busy day during a lunch break, breeze through a few minutes while waiting in the parking lot for a child's soccer practice to end, or make a two-hour delay at the airport much more bearable. And with child-friendly titles such as 'Herbie: Fully Loaded' and 'Babe,' Sprint Movies are also great to keep the kids busy in the backseat."

Three problems here:

Cellphone entertainment is about brief, unpredictable interludes. No one watches movies 3 minutes at a time.

While mobile phone screens are getting better, they are nowhere near movie-adequate yet. Just thinking about watching Spiderman 2 on one gives me a headache.

And cellphones are still cellphones first, everything else second. No one's going to risk running down their battery downloading and watching a film if it means there's even a slight chance of not being able to make or receive an important call.

Jup clients looking for a better sense of what's really going to work in cellphone video should look out for some upcoming research.