Telecom Roundup: AT&T into Video, VMWare Goes Mobile, More

AT&T wants to be in pictures — AT&T has decided to get into the online video business by creating an aggregation site called VideoCrawler. Using indexing and search technology from Divvio, it will pull in content from such sources as YouTube, Hulu, Google Video, and MySpace Video. It will make money off advertising, but also makes you wonder whether, by joining the ranks of carriers claiming that they need to cap user downloads by instituting different access for pay levels, it’s trying to drive users into higher fees. [Source: Ars Technica, BNET Industry Technology Blog]

Mobile virtualization — VMWare is pursuing the mobile phone market with a mobile virtualization offering. Enterprise users with appropriately enabled phones (expected starting in 2010) would be able, for example, to enable one operating system and set of applications for business use and another for personal use. People could also more easily move content from one phone to another. We can already see the commercials: “Can you run me now?” [Source: InfoWorld]

Virgin numbers strong — Virgin Mobile saw a $4.1 million profit last quarter, versus the $7.4 million loss the year before. That was three cents a share higher than analyst expectations, giving industry people hope that maybe there’s a way to weather the current economic storms. [Source: AP]

FCC tries digital TV workaround — One problem facing the television industry is that with the change to digital broadcasting, stations may find their signals not reaching as far as previously. The concept is to set up an additional array of digital transmitters over the signal area rather than one tower. But the stations aren’t required to use it, and theyre probably going to start making the serious trade-off calculations: potentially lower advertising revenue versus predictably higher capital expenses at a time when cash is dear. [Source: Ars Technica]