MobiTV comes to its senses

  It always amazes me when companies can’t see the forest for the trees.

Take for example MobiTV, a provider of content for mobile phones, that threatened to shut down HowardForums, the uber popular online exchange run by Toronto-based Howard Chui (which seems to be devoid of good mobile biz dirt these days) this week.

The MobiTV-Howard Forums (does anyone else wanna say Howard’s Forums?) Bay of Pigs started over a series of links published on Howard’s site that allowed virtually anyone to take a peek into MobiTV’s content for nada.

Don’t know how but some crafty users found security holes in MobiTV’s systems wide enough to accommodate a Mack truck. Instead of closing the hole, MobiTV decided to blame Howard Forums and its users when it warned of impending legal action; MobiTV threatened to shut the site down.

Why Howard just didn’t remove the links is beyond me – perhaps he saw a slippery content removal slope coming.

Here’s what Chui had to say.

"These feeds do not appear to be protected in any way, and it appears anyone with a compatible phone can view them," Chui wrote in a posting. He questioned why MobiTV was operating its service without authenticating its subscribers.

This is a classic case of "shoot the messenger." Instead of patching the hole and moving on, MobiTV decided to go after those that exposed its problem.

UPDATE: According to a posting on HowardForum, the issue has been resolved (MobiTV’s co-founder Paul Scanlan who wrote Howard Chui with a further explanation needs to use the spell check feature before he posts anything in future).

But MobiTV still has egg on its face – the company brought unnecessary attention to itself with its threats; not a smart move for a young, growing company trying to capture the imagination of North American cell phone users.

Next task – lower the cost of the MobiTV service in Canada; It’s outrageously expensive!