I was excited to see that Bruce of ROK has posted a comment to the article I published here regarding the ROK Mobile TV service offering.
I found their service concept extremely exciting and very appealing but was quite worried by the data costs. Interestingly, since then, T-Mobile have apparently introduced their ‘unlimited’ (within reason) data plans across their Web’n’Walk price plans. I need to check this. Theoretically I could avail myself of this now!
Read Bruce’s comment in the context of the existing discussion on the post here.
Find out more about ROK TV (and get an account) here: http://www.rok.tv
For simplicity, I’ve also pasted Bruce’s comments into this post as well:
Hello – this is Bruce at ROK.
Great to see discussion on some of our new content-for-mobile technologies!
Firstly
– though – the space-shifting Black Box does not require GPRS bandwidth
as long as you’re in a Wi-Fi zone. And Wi-Fi zones/Hot-Spots are all
around us in ever increasing numbers.\n\nIt\’s only when you\’re outside a Hot-Spot that the ROK Black Box finds your handset via GPRS.
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On the subject of ROK TV – our 2.5G mobile TV service via GPRS, I must say that the prices some networks charge for GPRS in the UK on certain tariffs is outrageous. And very short-sighted. So we can only accept subscriptions from people who either have a GPRS data package in their tariff or who don\’t mind paying their network hand-over-fist for it.
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That said, we launched ROK TV in the UK mainly to prove the technology works.
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Our plan is to launch ROK TV service in countries where GPRS is sold on an \’all-you-can-eat\’ basis for a very modest fee.
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And – just to clarify – ROK TV plays at 14fps on 2.5G GPRS and will, when we launch our 3G version, play at 24fps.
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