The ever intelligent Mike Masnick makes a great point in an post called "Why Mobile TV?" on TechDirt Wireless about the Mobile TV hype in places like Gizmodo, or here, or here.

Again, it always seems to come back to a single issue: mobile devices are primarily communications devices, not broadcast devices -- and most of the mobile TV efforts seem heavily focused on simply moving the TV broadcast experience to the phone -- which just doesn't seem that compelling.

This does raise two possible questions to contemplate:
1) short of true "video phones", a'la Dick Tracy, can video be used in a manner more befitting the true idiomatic use of the mobile phone? Video on a phone that's more like true communication, less just watching old news clips?
2) the discussion of "broadcast versus communication" or a "one-to-many versus one-to-one" is a very valuable way to frame the discussion of the merits of any mobile application. It's clear that simply transposing a successful broadcast framework to the mobile (like TV, or even the web, for that matter) might be useful -- sometimes-- it fails to truly address, or perhaps adapt, to the way in which the content itself is being accessed and consumed, and the context in which it is most valuable.

[btw, title quote from Orson Welles]