CTIA: MobiTV hits 1M subscriber mark

MobiTV officials revealed today that it has surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark for its wireless streaming television service, doubling its customer base in just six months, and announced a new hotspot-targeted service that will allow customers to stream MobiTV content over a Wi-Fi connection to any laptop.

With mobile TV expected to be a hot topic at this year’s CTIA Wireless show, MobiTV has emerged as one of the sector’s darlings, making a business case for live TV over the handset before many people felt it was a viable market. MobiTV, however has branched out from direct feeds of channels like CNN and MSNBC to host made-for-mobile content and program its own channels.

Many of those new subscriber adds came from MobiTV’s growing international operations. It now has carrier deals in place with 3 and Orange in the U.K.; Telus, Rogers and Bell Mobility in Canada; Movistar in Ecuador and Peru; and Verizon in the Dominican Republic. A MobiTV spokesman, however, said 70% to 75% of MobiTV’s customers are still in the U.S., where it runs on the decks of Sprint, Cingular Wireless, Alltel, Midwest Wireless, Cellular South and two Puerto Rican carriers.

MobiTV is also moving forward with its plan to bring its service beyond the cellular network to the Internet proper. MobiTV said today it is working with Microsoft to port its television channel line-up to the PC and Windows Mobile powered devices using Windows Media Player and Microsoft’s digital rights management platform.