After inking a deal with Samsung last month to deliver movies directly to your home, Blockbuster announced on Tuesday that its OnDemand service is also coming to your mobile phone.
Blockbuster OnDemand, to be available on "select" Motorola mobile phones, will provide users with access to "thousands" of films, the company said in a statement. Users of the upcoming application, whose release date is yet to be announced, will also be able to choose films for home delivery or reserve titles for in-store pickup.
According to Blockbuster, the Motorola deal is yet another element in its strategy of providing consumers with options to get its movies anywhere, at any time.
For its part, Motorola believes that offering Blockbuster movies on its handsets will help it regain some of its appeal. The company once sat atop the mobile-phone industry. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. And it's trying desperately to regain some market share.
That might be coming through Android-based devices. Motorola has already signed on to deliver Android phones. Blockbuster's app might become a component in that strategy. But by competing with the iPhone and its many multimedia capabilities, Motorola and Blockbuster will be facing an uphill battle.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Apple's iPhone jumped to the top spot on the AdMob Network for the month of October, with 4.1 percent of the mobile ads requested from the network, according to the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report released Wednesday.
Requests from advertisers for mobile ads targeted to iPhone users rose to 236 million in October, more than doubling from the 103 million requests recorded in the previous month. Worldwide, AdMob's mobile-ad requests for all device makers grew 13.8 percent in October, to 5.8 billion.
AdMob delivers banner and text ads to mobile devices, and these figures were analyzed and aggregated as part of its monthly Mobile Metrics report. AdMob-served ads are seen by people visiting clients' Web sites with their mobile phone. Advertisers can choose to have their ads appear on a certain type of device, or region of the world, and then AdMob places the ads on partner publishers' mobile sites.
Mobile advertising is on a fast track, with research firms projecting market revenue to reach $19 billion per year by 2011, up from the approximately $3 billion seen for last year.
Fueling the iPhone's October performance was particularly strong traffic outside the United States, which accounted for 37 percent of its ad requests, according to the AdMob report. Western Europe represented 17 percent of the iPhone ad requests, and Asia represented 8 percent.
Other handset players following close behind included the Motorola Razr V3, which received 3.4 percent of the requests; Nokia's N70, with 3.2 percent; and the Motorola Krzr K1c, with 1.8 percent.
But in the U.S. market alone, the iPhone ranked No. 2, with 6.9 percent of the requests, while Motorola's Razr V3 led the market, with 7.7 percent. The U.S. market accounted for 62.8 percent of the iPhone's ad requests in October.
Requests from advertisers for mobile ads targeted to iPhone users more than doubled from September to October.
(Credit: AdMob)
Motorola, which has been struggling to find a home run hitter to replace its Razr, appears to be gearing up to debut a social-networking smartphone that uses Google's mobile operating system, Android, according to a BusinessWeek report.
Motorola's Android phone, according to the report, is expected to feature a touch screen similar to Apple's popular iPhone, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that allows users to connect to such social-networking sites as MySpace and Facebook. It is unclear how similar it will be to T-Mobile USA's newly released G1 phone, manufactured by HTC, which also uses Android.
The phone is anticipated to make its U.S. debut in the second quarter of next year, according to sources cited in the BusinessWeek report, which noted that carriers have already seen spec sheets and images of the devices.
Motorola's Android phone may carry a price of approximately $150 to $180, with a two-year carrier contract, according to the report.
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