Commonwealth Games To Go Live On Mobile Phones

This has more details of Australian incumbent Telstra‘s mobile coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, picked up as part of an over-all deal worth $20-25 million. Telstra is keen that the coverage will boost its 3G consumer base, sitting at a miserly 25K subscribers, or 3% of the Australian 3G market.
I suspect that Telstra plans to use its market buying power (mobile, internet, pay TV etc) to lock-in content deals for some big events, and it rarely gets bigger than the Commonwealth Games. The idea is that people will join the 3G service to get the content…the company plans to put all of the content on its BigPond internet portal onto its 3G service.
3 is doing better, although it is a 3G pureplay. It has 700,000 customers. “Over the summer’s cricket Test series, sponsored by 3, there were more than 260,000 cricket video “streaming events”, watched by a combination of casual users and fans on $8 monthly all-you-can-watch subscriptions.”
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