Forget those massive 50-inch LED screens and jaw-dropping home-entertainment systems. The biggest trend in movies and television is, paradoxically, pretty small. Many of us now can access full-length motion pictures and TV shows with our cell phones.
AT&T is on the cutting edge of this new trend. The company has partnered with several broadcast networks to give users access to such shows as
Lost,
Grey’s Anatomy and
30 Rock. It’s also partnering with Sony Pictures, opening doors for cell-phone users to watch such movies as
Ghostbusters and
Groundhog Day on their itty-bitty screens.
The market for such fare is still relatively small: Only 7 percent of mobile subscribers watch video from their phones, but that audience is growing rapidly, accounting for $308 million worth of business the last quarter of 2007.
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“Everyone (was) really, really skeptical about who would want to watch movies on a little cell phone,” says Ron Schonfield of Disney, “but we are very pleasantly surprised. We entered it initially as an experiment, but we’re seeing it’s a real business.”
(USA Today)