Review: ROK TV is hot!

Having announced the worlds first video-on-demand mobile TV service over 2.5G yesterday, I figured it was time to give ROK TV a whirl and check it out in a bit more depth.

To get going, it’s really simple. Click on ROK’s website, and select your country. A list of phones – with pictures (in case you’re not quite sure what model your phone is!) appears, and once you’ve selected the correct model you just enter your mobile phone number. A few seconds later, a text appears, and after a few clicks and a bit of downloading you’ve got the app installed and ready to go.

So, assuming you’ve done all of that, and created an account, what now? Fire up the application, and you’ll be presented with a menu of folders, which contain a number of different channels, like so:

Select the channel you want – in my case I fancied a bit of car action from Fifth Gear – and click. A few seconds of buffering later, and you’ve got full control of the channel you wanted:

Now if you haven’t seen ROK TV before, you might be pleasantly surprised at speed it fires up at, and the wonderful picture quality. Here are a handful screen grabs from the Fifth Gear channel, running on a Nokia E61. Bearing in mind the sheer amount of data in a TV picture, especially with fast moving content like sport, or in this case cars flying round a track, and I think you’ll be impressed at the performance:

So, there you go – impressive stuff. If you’re in the UK you can look forward to some fantastic channels, including ITN, National Geographic, Popworld, and even the latest news and sport read live by the ‘Monkey News Team of Monkeys’ (I kid you not!). All this entertainment on the move for £9.99 a month, with the first two months free.

Hats off to the guys at ROK, they’ve done a fantastic job. The only small downside is you’re using around 1Mb of data transfer for every four minutes, so it’s best to get yourself on an ‘unlimited but limited’ all inclusive data tariff, like T-Mobile’s Web & Walk. Even with the 1Gb T-Mobile ‘fair usage’ policy, you should manage to get over 60 hours of TV via ROK for your moneys worth – so plenty enough for the bus ride into work, or passing the time whilst waiting for the train in the morning.