Interview: Paul Scanlan, COO, MobiTV

[By Staci D. Kramer] It took two years for MobiTV to sign up its first 500,000 customers — and just six months for the next 500,000. The growth has been aided by the availability of more video-capable handsets and increasing access to wireless broadband, along with greater awareness of mobile devices as a way to watch various forms of TV and video. During an in-depth conversation at CTIA, co-founder and COO Paul Scanlan talked about some of the advances the company has made in the past year, the move beyond phones to laptops, and possible involvement in the Sprint-cable joint venture. Other services on the product map: DVR-like capabilities, an online locker for off-device storage through MobiTV, Scanlan also was quite frank about the location shifting options from Sling Media and others, spurred, in part, by my use of Slingbox Mobile on a Cingular device that doesn’t support MobiTV. Some excerpts:

Someone suggested to me that Slingbox disrupts you out of business. “Sling, in a weird kind of way, is actually helping our business more than most people would think. One of the nice things about what Sling is doing is they’re really agitating the content partners. รข

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