They took my CNN away......

Vodafone and Sky Mobile TV

I have been using Sky Mobile TV on Vodafone for the past several months. It's one of the Vodafone Live! offerings. For $2.50 / week, you get access to a number of Sky channels on your 3G phone. The ONLY reason I added it to my service was to watch CNN. I have NO interest in reality TV on MTV, cartoons on Cartoon Network, or Hollywood gossip on E! or the various sports and soft porn that compose the rest of the Sky Mobile TV offerings. The Prime news bulletin from the previous day isn't compelling by itself.

CNN was the big draw for me. Not that it's that great. The time to useful information ratio was at the low end of the scale, but it was useful to listen to on the headset and pull the phone out of the pocket for a look if anything interesting came up. I would have much preferred BBC World to CNN-I.

Today when I tried to watch CNN, I found it was gone. Hmmm. I called 777 to find out if this was a glitch. As often happens, the person answering the phone at first didn't understand what I was talking about. Then she went away for ages to find out and came back with: "I'm sorry, Sir. If it's no longer on the menu, it must be gone."

At time of writing, the Vodafone web site still includes CNN as one of the listed channels. I've sent a note asking them to confirm the fate of CNN. Without it, the Sky Mobile service is rendered uninteresting to me and I won't be continuing the subscription to it.

Zimbabwe

Looks like the gloves are coming off. The Mugabe push-back, backed by the police, appears to now be underway. Sad to see Mugabe living down to our lowest expectations of him.