Live football on your mobile

Men torn unhappily away from their television - or the pub - on a Saturday afternoon have long stolen quick glances at their mobiles to keep up to date.

Now the football-hungry gazing under the table could become more lengthy; Sky has announced deals with some of the major networks to carry its sports channels as part of their mobile TV services.

From next Saturday, all the matches shown on Sky Sports 1, 2, and 3 will be available live on Sky Mobile TV, and another service - '24-7 Football' - will show goals and other highlights immediately after every Premier League and Champions League game.

Both services cost £5 a month each, and do not require the customer to be a Sky subscriber.

Live games will be available only to Vodafone and Orange customers - they are the only networks which offer Sky Mobile TV; 'Football 24-7' will be offered by all 5 major carriers.

BSkyB, which is 39.1 per cent owned by News Corporation, parent company of Times Online, said today that there were more than 30 million handsets in the UK that were able to access video content, quoting M:Metrics.

A less rosy picture, however, has been painted by the same research company when it comes to actual uptake of mobile TV services. Only 321,000 people - out of a total 45 million mobile users - watch broadcast TV on their phone once a month, according to M:Metrics.

The mobile TV market has been the subject of unrest in recent weeks because of a wider debate about which platform is most suitable for the service in the long term.

A fortnight ago the European Union called on member states to adopted a standard called Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds (DVB-H), a format backed by Nokia, when rolling out mobile TV.

A week later, in an announcement that many observers suggested was not unrelated, BT said it was pulling the service which had powered Virgin's mobile TV offering. BT's service, which had garnered only 10,000 subscribers despite a big advertising push by Virgin, ran using a different standard - Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), which is not compatible with DVB-H.

The majority of mobile TV services in the UK to date have been 'unicast', meaning they have been distributed via the 3G network.

While some analysts have been upbeat about the prospects for mobile TV, pointing out that three major UK operators have launched services with - between them - almost 450,000 subscribers, M:Metrics has said that in order to gain "mass market adoption", providers must deploy broadcast networks.

Trials using a range of mobile TV formats are still being conducted.