Virgin Mobile is pulling the plug on its Virgin Mobile 5 channel TV service and the Lobster 700TV (also known as the HTC Trilogy) handset. In turn, British Telecom announced it was abandoning the Movio project which supplied the service to Virgin.
The Lobster handset had not been well received and poor sales played a role in Virgin’s decision. Another factor was the announcement by the European Commission to support the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting — Handheld) standard. The BT Movio service used the rival DAB-IP (Digital Audio Broadcasting — IP) protocol.
According to Virgin Mobile and British Telecom, the service will remain in operation until at least the end of January 2008. Virgin confirmed that customers will still have access to DAB radio stations past that date.
While this experiment may have failed, mobile broadcast television is still expected to attract more than 40 million subscribers by 2012. Will the Lobster live again?