Talking pictures coming to cell phones

LAS VEGAS - The screens may be tiny and batteries overworked, but the wireless industry is bringing TV to a cell phone near you.

With the mammoth International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a backdrop, Verizon Wireless planned today to detail a robust new service for mobile phones, one that promises better-quality audio and video - albeit custom-designed for the numerous constraints of a handheld device.

Verizon also plans to announce a major increase in the number of markets where its high-speed wireless technology will be available, as well as wider coverage in the 20 markets where it was introduced last year, according to a company source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The new Verizon offering, along with other multimedia wireless services unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, marks a big step in the industry's push to generate revenue from more than just phone calls.

On Thursday, SmartVideo Technologies Inc. announced deals to deliver live and prerecorded TV programs from ABC News, CNBC, MSNBC and The Weather Channel to cell phones equipped with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system. The service, priced from $13 to $18 a month, is accessed through a Microsoft Web site featuring other forms of content customized for mobile devices.

Consumers have already shown an appetite for mobile e-mail, Web browsing, music and video games, but many experts view the public fascination with TV and movies as an especially potent lure for premium wireless services.

"Video is leaps and bounds above anything else" in terms of importance to users, said Roger Entner, an industry analyst for The Yankee Group. "This can certainly bring people in, because it's really eye candy."

But while cellular TV has been available for several years in South Korea, wireless providers in Europe and North America are only now upgrading their networks with technology powerful enough to transmit video that doesn't look more like a slide show.

Sprint Corp., for example, has led the charge in this country with two pay-TV services using a technological predecessor to EV-DO, the next-generation platform that Verizon Wireless has already deployed on a broad scale and that Sprint is only now beginning to roll out. While the audio comes in clear, the Sprint video barely resembles a moving picture and breaks up repeatedly.

But even with more bandwidth, it's not so easy to replicate the big screen experience on a device with limited screen size, audio quality, processing power, storage capacity, and battery life - the last of which tends to suffer with improvements to any of the other factors.