ROK Entertainment, the UK-based mobile TV vendor, says that it has successfully completed the world's first music concert to be streamed live over mass-market 2.5G via GPRS to mobile phones.
The 'Be My Guest' concert was staged on Saturday 14th July at the Bangkok Hall in Thailand and was streamed across a 4 hour period, live and exclusive, to mobile operator AIS's ROK TV service.
Interestingly, the concert was staged during a torrential rainstorm in Bangkok which disabled satellite TV for many people, yet the ROK TV stream over GPRS remained unaffected.
Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman of ROK said "Live events have been streamed over 3G networks before but never over GPRS so we are delighted to have successfully set the tone - and the model - for this brand new mass-market mobile entertainment service, going forward".
In order to prevent any possible GPRS bandwidth capacity problems, AIS restricted the number of viewers able to access the stream at any one time to 4,000 people. Existing subscribers to ROK TV on AIS were asked to bid, via SMS, for an access code to watch the concert for free.
AIS reported a total of more than 15,000 people watched ROK TV on their mobiles on the day of the concert.
ROK TV on AIS was officially launched in May 2007 and currently has nearly 80,000 subscribers."
Posted to the site on 17th July 2007
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/24962.php