QuickPlay's Mobile DVR

QuickPlay’s Mobile DVR

Back in the 20th century, when Tivo was still in alpha, I was assigned to write an article on it. As I learned more about Tivo, I thought: this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for my entire TV watching life.

I had the mobile version of that epiphany with QuickPlay Media’s PrimeTime2Go, which is essentially a DVR for the

QuickPlay's PrimeTime2Go

mobile phone. Announced at CTIA in April (where it was named a LAPTOP Magazine Best of CTIA Wireless 2009 award winner in the “Best Music/Video Application” category), PrimeTime2Go is a monthly subscription fee-based service that enables consumers to download and watch full-length episodes of their favorite shows on-demand anytime, anywhere.

What’s new is that the announcement turned into reality this month, as Quickplay is now “shipping” PrimeTime2Go for Blackberry phones, initially via the BlackBerry App World storefront. The app download itself is free; the service is a $7.99 monthly subscription. Phones capable of using the service are, for now, limited to the BlackBerry Bold™ and BlackBerry Curve 8900 smart phones, for AT&T and T-Mobile customers.

Full-length episodes available include Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Office, Heroes, CSI, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Hannah Montana, Top Chef, The Young and the Restless…you get the idea. Something for everyone. ESPN, Discovery Channel and Animal Planet are also on board in addition to cable networks Bravo, USA and SciFi.

PrimeTime2Go works as following: the download occurs in the background over a WiFi network. Then subscribers can watch the program anytime until the pre-determined viewing period expires. Key features include: MySeries, which enables the consumer to have new episodes of a selected TV series to automatically download after the air date, and Pause and Resume, which allows the user to pause a program, exit the application and resume viewing from where he or she left off. Due to the digital rights management concerns of PrimeTime2Go’s content providers, content is locked to the device to which the content is downloaded; in other words - no sharing, at least for now.

The technology is based on the phone’s micro SD card; a 1 GB card can record up to 6 hours of mobile quality video. The downloaded episodes are resident on the micro SD card, which means that the user can watch it even if he has no

Mark Hyland

access to a 3G network.”It’s like a storage for your camera,” says Quickplay vp of marketing Mark Hyland. “It’s becoming cheaper and cheaper.” Indeed. Can the micro SD version of feature films be far off?

“We’ve done the service with WiFi initially so people aren’t surprised by excessive charges,” adds Hyland. “But you can browse the catalog and set the recordings with any 3G connections and then download by WiFi. If your device charges at home or at work you have WiFi, it’ll recognize that and download via WiFi.”

PrimeTime2Go marries two trends: the increase in viewing content on-demand, via everything from Tivo to iTunes, and the growing market of mobile video and TV.

Apple has thus far owned this market and proved that downloading content for future viewing and viewing video on mobile devices are both winning propositions. But not everyone has an iPhone; in fact recent statistics showed Blackberries outselling the Apple. The time might just be perfect for PrimeTime2Go to go big.

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