Sprint: “The First American Carrier to Provide Mobile Video on Demand Services”
In September of 2006, mSpot launched the first ever JAVA-based mobile VOD service on any North American carrier – white-labeled Sprint Movies.
Sprint keenly understood the opportunity around mobile video, but needed a partner with not only the rights to the content, but also the technology to deliver a turnkey video-on-demand service. mSpot’s ground-breaking technology enabled the first mobile viewing experience: titles were chapterized so users could decide where to start the movie, and the Resume feature allowed users to re-start a movie within a minute of where they stopped play. Users could also Pause, Fast Forward and Rewind, allowing for the first time ever truly on-demand full-length mobile video.
mSpot secured content from major movie studios like Universal, Disney, Paramount and others and leveraged these partnerships to regularly refresh content, sometimes offering titles the same day they were released to DVD. Depending on the title and studio, users had a flexible viewing window of 24 hours to 1 week with extensions available.
Two years after launch, Sprint began offering Sprint Movies within its core media player, Sprint TV, which enabled faster deployment of mSpot services to new-to-market devices. No longer would mSpot need to create a custom port for every device; Sprint Movies was available on any multi-media device out of the box.
Learn more about Mobile Movies
Streaming radio on Sprint was mSpot’s first product launch with a North American carrier. Partnering with Sprint in March of 2005, mSpot launched mSpot Radio, an all-format mobile radio service which boasted nearly 100 channels of music, news, sports, weather, talk and podcasts from national brands such as Associated Press, NPR, MarketWatch, Accuweather, Radio Disney, ESPN and more. In June of the same year, Sprint white-labeled the service, branding it Sprint Radio and promoting it as Sprint’s core radio offering. In April of 2007, as part of a strategic effort to promote its data plans, Sprint launched sister products Sprint Radio Basic and Sprint Radio Premier, which were made available for free with Sprint data plans. Sprint Radio Premier proved to be hugely popular with customers who loved the live-local terrestrial radio stations that the service offered. Customers could access over 100 local radio stations across the nation, straight from their mobile devices. Users could search by region or genre to find their favorite home-town stations and listen from anywhere that a network connection is available.