FlyTunes is fueling for takeoff. The mobile content network, which is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, on Thursday added a bevy of new services. These include video and audio podcasts, a new user interface and a customizable channel guide.
With the new additions FlyTunes now offers more than 350 channels, which run the gamut: business, technology, news, entertainment, politics, health and on down the line. FlyTunes is also releasing a streamlined user interface that lets users find and select channels from two dialog boxes; each selected channel now displays more detailed information, such as an SMS text message link. The new MyGuide feature allows people to personalize their mobile media by adding or nuking individual channels (and even entire genres) from the selection menu.
“It’s going to be a radically different world of mobile media” in the next few years, said Sam Abadir, CEO of FlyTunes. “We want to give people content they want, wherever and whenever they want it.”
Abadir’s last thought explains why FlyTunes since its 2006 inception has bypassed the desktop entirely, betting that mobile media will in due time start to explode.
“The desktop and hand-held devices are different worlds and doing either one of them well is a big task,” Abadir said. “Right now the numbers are reverse but in a few years there will be billions of handsets that will be rich-media capable and treated as a much bigger market than PCs.”
Abadir added that a “slew” of increasingly sophisticated mobile phones that will be rich-media ready are going to be released in the next several months by BlackBerry (Research in Motion Limited) and Sony Ericsson.
Already 70% of new cars that roll off the assembly line are equipped with iPod jacks, according to Abadir. “We view the world changing very quickly,” he said. “And we’re doing everything we can to deliver a compelling experience when more (mobile) phones become available.”
Stay tuned (sorry).
