A few months ago, I wrote about Bitbop, a paid all-you-can watch TV service for smartphones with major network shows and high-quality downloads. At the time it ran only on BlackBerries. But here at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, the company just unveiled an Android version. No news about an iPhone version, but with the somewhat similar Hulu Plus on the way for Apple devices, that’s not a huge loss. (Bitbop is from Fox, which is also part owner of Hulu.)
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BitBop TV for BlackBerry Goes Live
Got a BlackBerry and feeling a little left out of the excitement this week? Here’s something to cheer you up: a cool service that’s only for BlackBerries right now. BitBop, a TV service that was previously available only as a closed beta, has opened up. And so far it only runs on RIM’s phones: the Bold, the Curve, and the Tour.
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New Takes on TV in Your Pocket
Hulu Mobile. It doesn’t actually exist, but when and if Hulu arrives on cell phones, it’s going to have a huge audience. And in the meantime, you might want to check out Bitbop, a new TV-on-phones service which was announced yesterday at the CTIA Wireless show. (It’s part of Fox Mobile, whose parent company, News Corporation, is part owner of Hulu.)
Bitbop will offer TV shows (and, later, movies) from Fox, NBC Universal, Discovery, and other sources as both streams and downloads, via an app that will be available in iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry versions. It’s a for-pay service with a Netflix-like business model: Ten bucks a month gets you all the content you can watch. The company plans to make the apps and service available within the next few weeks.
I got a quick peek at Bitbop at the MobileFocus press event in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, and it was enough to leave me wanting to try it out, at least. Also at MobileFocus was another pocketable TV product which I first saw at CES in January, and which still hasn’t shipped: Mophie’s Juice Pack TV for the iPhone. It’s a version of the company’s Juice Pack Air case/battery pack with a built-in tuner for Qualcomm’s FLO TV service.