More like 2.5 screens

AT&T has announced a big promotional event with Chase and country performer Tim McGraw that purportedly combines its advertising, entertainment and three-screen strategies in one big shebang.

The reason I say purportedly is that, on closer examination, Swampstock's third-screen component leaves a lot to be desired. AT&T is broadcasting the performance — along with loads of bonus multimedia — and video on its TV and broadband channels. But a wireless contribution to the effort will be a streamed channel over MobiTV, an application used by a small number of AT&T subscribers. AT&T's main video portal, Cingular Video, won't carry the content.

Otherwise ringtones and wallpapers are the wireless screen's main contribution to AT&T's coming out party as an entertainment company. I'm sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. Not airing content from the event over Cingular Video when it clearly has the capability (AT&T negotiated this deal with the festival organizers, so clearly distribution rights shouldn't have been an issue) is a huge missed opportunity — one that has to make AT&T customers wonder when this three-screen convergence it keeps hyping will emerge.

It may sound like I'm just giving AT&T a hard time since no other carrier has yet to pull off a multimodal event of this magnitude. But if I'm holding AT&T to a higher standard, it's the company's own fault. We've been bombarded for more than a year with its three-screen marketing, which doesn't just sell us the promise of convergence but actually shows video traversing the three media: from TV to PC to wireless display.

If you don't think that raising expectations and not meeting them is problem, look back a few years when Sprint launched the Internet-on-your-phone campaign. That boast was clearly way out of proportion to what the limited wireless application protocol browsers, black-and-white screens and 2.5G connections were capable of delivering. Arguably, it set mobile data adoption in the U.S. back by a year or two. Now AT&T risks doing the same thing with convergence. It has set the bar very high for itself, yet it's failing to deliver.