Today, Verizon announced a new video application that will allow subscribers of their FiOS television service to watch live, linear programming on an iPad. Before anyone gets too excited, the application — which is scheduled to be released early next year — does have one fairly enormous catch. As reported by Gigaom, “subscribers with an iPad will only be able to watch linear programming within their own home, which allows Verizon to authenticate and make certain that the users have access to whatever content they have paid for.” Verizon has said that all the backend legwork to make the TV streams available has been completed; they are now woking on getting content providers comfortable with the idea of their precious shows being available on devices other than television sets.
Verizon also announced a new video-on-demand application that will debut in Q4. The application, “will allow subscribers to purchase and rent videos and watch them across multiple devices and multiple platforms,” including the DROID X, DROID 2, BlackBerry Storm and handsets running Windows Mobile 6.5 (wah?).
All pretty exciting stuff in the mobile entertainment realm. Our one question is: why would we want to watch TV on a 9.7-inch iPad screen when we’re in the same vicinity as our HDTV? Thoughts?
