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September 21, 2003
This is ... a chance to drive revenue
Unfortunately CNN is no longer available through the PDA AvantGo service.Coming Soon, CNN will be introducing exciting new content and services for your mobile devices, simply enter your email address to receive the latest information.
I'm looking for a minimal page for CNN, even though the main page works all right with my phone's browser, anygraaf's Doris Browser.
I've submitted my e-mail address for updates, but here's another example of CNN trading off viewership for (what I suspect will be) premium services.
September 21, 2003 in CNN | Permalink
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Actually, I bet they just got tired of paying for AvantGo in today's world or built in browsers on PDAs and cell phones... I mean really? AvantGo is to mobile publishing what AOL is to dialup service. A tool to get those publishers and users on a mobile platform that they don't want to take the time to learn more about...
Don't get me wrong, AvantGo is a cool service and works great, and is something I used for a few years (a while ago) but it doesn't pay for a publisher to use it. AvantGo charges publishers too much to support a publishing platform that doesn't produce enough revenue to for the costs...
I'd look for a free mobile service from CNN in the future with a more robust mobile service available for a premium, but what do I know?
Posted by: john at Sep 21, 2003 1:58:50 PM
I hope you're right, but it would surprise me.
There's absolutely nothing that keeps CNN from taking the pages they used to present through AvantGo, moving them to a new directory (since the old one is named 'avantgo'), and redirecting requests from the old to the new.
Many people who didn't use AvantGo used the lightweight pages sites generated for it to support PDAs and phones through apps like Plucker. All of those people will look for alternatives to CNN, and many will find them.
Based on this page, I would expect the new CNN offerings to follow a cable TV model like their TV and phone services: CNN signs an agreement with a service provider, and all that provider's customers have access to the service.
As a result of such a deal between T-Mobile and CNN, I actually have decent CNN service through WAP on my phone. I can also load the full-HTML pages with a browser.
I just was looking for a presentation that better matched up with the capabilities of my phone, wasting less screen real estate on ads and nav bars, but including small pictures where stories have them.
Posted by: Frank at Sep 21, 2003 5:05:30 PM