Ramping up on the competitive space

It is interesting to survey this space since the permutations are virtually exploding.

A couple of interesting ones are:
kyte.tv
videoegg.com
crushorflush.com
http://www.vuze.com/app (OK not strictly a mobile TV station)
joost.com (of course)
akimbo.com
att.mobitv.com
mobitv.com
broadcaster.com
http://video.tvguide.com/

Each of the entrants has taken a different slant on the opportunity.

It may be worthwhile to segment the space a bit more as well, in order, to categorize the "entrants" into the space:
IPTV - Set top box integration, replacing cable infrastructure, think competitor to DOCSIS 3.0 that Comcast recently announced. U-Verse is the largest effort and is based on Microsoft's IPTV project. I have spoken to people involved on the project and the tangle of MSSQL and IIS's that this entails is rather intimidating given my past experience (albeit that was several years ago)

Internet TV - Ability to view streams via HTTP often facilitated via HTML pages containing RTSP streaming content, downloads, sometime peer to peer, some proprietary RTSP clients (aka Real, Windows), some open standards (aka Darwin Streaming Server). There is a lot of activity here with little real "winner". Arguably, this has been around for quite some time (think porn), but it has only recently gathered attention. These are a combination of link aggregators (TV Guide), premium purchase (Akimbo), peer to peer aggregators (Joost and Vuze), and subscription content (att.mobitv.com). It looks like free will win the day in this place so determining a way to make sufficient money to pay for your bandwidth is key. Most of the services cannot, so there will be an inevitable shakeout.

Mobile TV - Ability to view streams of content via carrier or carrier-partnered suppliers. In the US, the carriers own this relationship and hold on tight. They need to use their available bandwidth without degrading the service of the voice and non-video data users (which are where the real money is coming from). Here is a good high level link http://www.mobilehandsetdesignline.com/GLOBAL/electronics/designline/shared/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=193100051&pgno=1
that pretty much covers this space.

Video-based Services - This is the interesting place where convergence of Web 2.0 type capabilities with increasing bandwidth leads to interesting intersections. Check out videoegg.com and kyte.tv to see what I mean. It is not clear what means of leveraging video content with social capabilities will mean... but I would really like to determine what a video Personals combined with LBS on a mobile phone would look like... enter crushorflush.com If you are not familiar with hotornot.com, get out from under your rock and check it out. This is a clear place to satisfy your low self-esteem, calibrate your self-assessment, or just amuse yourself in the same way high school cheerleaders do in picking their squad.

More on the companies themselves later... at this point I am pretty happy with creating the categories.