Vodafone in mobile TV mystery

Link: Index : Mobile TV Playa – Vodacom

I stumbled across this page earlier, whilst researching something else. Vodacom – who incidently are 50% owned by Vodafone and 50% by Telkom, appear to have launched a mobile TV service. Nothing unusual? Have a look at the logo for a minute. It looks suspiciously like ROK TV’s logo.

ROK, as we all know, are big in mobile TV. They have a rather nifty service that works fine on 2.5G GPRS phones as well as 3G. In fact, one of their main unique selling points is you don’t have to go 3G for mobile TV.

Vodafone, on the other hand, are big into mobile TV on 3G. “It’s the future”, they cry – and have splashed silly amounts of money on recent advertising campaigns to promote how exciting it is to be able to be one of 12 people to a cell to have the privilege of watching telly on your phone.

Incidently, Vodafone are currently in talks to buy the remaining 50% of Vodacom that they don’t own from Telkom.

Putting two and two together and quite possibly getting five, I get the feeling something interesting is brewing. Knowing how responsive Vodafone’s press office usually is, I decided not to waste a few hours of my life trying to get a statement from them – so I placed a call to ROK’s Marketing Director Bruce Renny, who hasn’t yet called me back, and probably won’t now til tomorrow.

Assuming the answer is five, and a Vodafone joint venture (and, if the deal goes through, a wholy owned subsidary) has ended up with a GPRS-based mobile TV service when the corporate line is “3G TV all the way”, it could be a little embarrasing.