11th July - ROK TV announced that it is offering live and on-demand mobile TV streamed over existing 2.5G and 3G and networks as a subscription service aimed specifically at the users of Nokia Eseries devices.

ROK Entertainment Group, a leading mobile technology and applications development company and a specialist in the provision of mobile TV, has been appointed by Nokia to provide the service which is available via the Downloads! Service on selected Nokia Eseries devices.

ROK TV is available in the UK now and will subsequently deploy into mainland Europe from August onwards.

Commenting on the plans, David King, business development manager, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia said "Nokia Eseries customers tend to be professional people who seek instant information and entertainment, on-demand, so it is a logical and practicle step to offer our customers a business-orientated mobile TV service."

"We're absolutely delighted to be working with Nokia on this exciting deployment of mobile TV" said Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman of ROK. "As we know there is a huge and as-yet untapped market for live and instantly-available business and financial news amongst mobile TV customers."

ROK TV is available via the Downloads! Service on such devices as Nokia E61i and Nokia E65, initially, which the owner simply needs to activate to begin watching the services. Two channel packages will be offered - a 5 channel 'Strictly Business' package, to be charged in the UK at £5.00 a month, with a heavy emphasis on business news and information channels such as Bloomberg, CNBC Europe, EuroNews in 9 languages and regional news channels, and a 10 channel 'ROK All' TV package, to be charged at £10.00 a month containing all the live business news channels as well as additional sports news, music videos and comedy channels. As a trial, both TV packages will be free to view for the first 2 weeks.

"We are only targetting this service directly to those Nokia Eseries customers who have a data package in their mobile tariff to ensure subscribers do not pay additional data charges to their network operators." added Kendrick.

ROK TV requires 10mb of GPRS data per hour of streaming and, with mobile TV viewing patterns being for a few minutes at a time, once or twice a day, the typical monthly viewing duration is between two to three hours.

"We know what the consumers want from mobile TV and we will provide it for them," added Kendrick."We are finalising the last of the content agreements now, to include news channels in all the major European languages.”