3 Italia offer free mobile broadcast TV - paid for by ad’s

For the first time in Europe, consumers will be able to watch TV on their mobiles free of charge between the hours of 8am and midnight. The new service called “La3” provided by 3Italia will able to be free because of the inclusion of interactive advertising.

La3 is an in-house channel, showing sports, music and entertainment programming. Other channels included are RAI 1, RAI 2, Mediaset, Sky Meteo 24 and Current TV. Users will need a DVB-H receiver to watch.

“3 Italia is demonstrating once more how it can be innovative and far-sighted when it comes to the mobile content market”, comments Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Saverio Romeo.

Romeo goes on to describe how the past two years have been pivotal to the recent launch: “In May 2006, 3 Italia launched the first commercially viable DVB-H mobile TV solution, this really caught a sceptical market by surprise. Within 3 months, 3 Italia had more than 100,000 mobile TV subscribers. And whilst the other operators were busy catching up with such a success, in August 2007, 3 Italia had more than 700,000 subscribers to its service becoming the largest mobile TV provider in Europe. In addition to the distribution of content, the Italian mobile provider developed also an in house TV production facility and started to sell its own content.”

Source: Cellular News

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