MobiTV, the Emeryville start-up that offers TV and other digital content to your mobile phone and other connected devices, is soaking up the cash.
It has just raised $30 million more in its third round of venture capital, GigaOm reports. This make for a total of $100 million since July — and its valuation reportedly already exceeds $400 million.
Is this company red hot, or is it getting bloated? It started out serving mobile phones. But it has since expanded to support any device with broadband — via any WiFi, or with provider AT&T.
Large investors like Oak need to put their money to work, and so are willing to pay a high price. It has invested the most so far. The latest investors in MobiTV are Hearst Corp. and Adobe Systems. Hearst, of course, has all kinds of media properties, and it would make sense to distribute it over mobile phones and other gadgets. Adobe, meanwhile, is also flush with cash for ventures, having created a new venture arm. And Adobe, too, is interested in digital media distribution. It wants to support Apollo, its new system for running applications written in Flash, HTML, and JavaScript from the desktop.
3 Comments
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Luis said:
They will burn thru these $70MM like a good cigar to get to the end of nothing. MobiTV was a good idea for 2001 up to 2003 anything beyond that was pure wishful thinking……..
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Brian McConnell said:
MobiTV seems like a superfluous service to me. Most 3G phones can now pull streams directly from a source, via mobile friendly formats such as MPEG4 and 3GPP. All MobiTV has to offer are bundling deals for the carriers, but otherwise it is a classic middleman.
If you want basic cable and muzak on your phone, maybe MobiTV is interesting, but if you want to fetch a stream from your favorite radio station, all you need is a mobile data plan and a media capable handset.
Where MobiTV fits into the scheme of things in the long run, I don’t know.
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Sherwin said:
Ridiculous. How disconnected are these people? Nobody is watching TV on their tiny little phones.
3 Trackbacks
7:30 am
VentureBeat Wire » MobiTV brings in total of $100M for mobile TV said:
[...] See our story here. VentureBeat Community [...]
5:38 pm
Fast-growing MobiTV raises $5M more to fund equipment purchases; total funding now at $129M » VentureBeat said:
[...] Now it’s just raised $5 million from Leader Ventures — on top of $125 million it has already raised from venture firms Gefinor Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, private equity firm Oak Investment Partners and strategic investors Adobe Systems Inc. and Hearst Corp. [...]
12:27 pm
Voting for MobileBeat2008 best companies begins » VentureBeat said:
[...] MobiTV — offers TV and other digital content on your mobile devices via carriers; raised $100 million in 2006. [...]