As the new TV season begins, Sprint aims to offer more on-demand full-length TV series from the major networks than any other carrier. The following programs will launch their season premieres both on television and on mobile within the next six days: Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty from ABC; as well as CSI: NY and Numb3rs from CBS.
These shows will be available on Sprint TV on the day after they first appear on television. Additionally, the season premieres of ABC's Lost and CBS' Jericho are expected to launch in early 2008 and will be available on Sprint at that time. Customers will generally be able to access the four most recently televised episodes for each ABC series and the most recently televised episode for each CBS series.
The on-demand shows can be found within the Sprint TV application on the main menu of Sprint's Power Vision devices. The shows are included in the Sprint Power Vision TV Pack, which costs an additional $20 per month.
Before signing up to Sprint TV, we suggest you go to the nearest Sprint store to check out the streaming quality in your area. Unfortunately, many of the Sprint TV enabled phones have also diminished the service severely by offering mediocre displays and real estate.
We've tested Sprint TV on quite a few phones:
HTC Mogul - Very good
The HTC Mogul didn't support Sprint TV when it was released and tested. However, with excellent connectivity and a great display, it should now be all set for providing a good Sprint TV experience.
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Palm Treo 755p - Very good
 Videos look very good on the this phone, which handles streaming media smoothly. Still, the square screen wreaks havoc on aspect ratios, requiring letterboxes of just about every video.
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Sanyo M1 - Good
 Streaming speeds to the M1 were not as good as we've seen recently on other phones, but it did display videos full screen, in either portrait or landscape modes. Initial buffering speeds were fine, usually about five seconds to start a video, but videos sometimes became blocky or stuttered. Play video of Sprint TV in action...
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LG Muziq - Good
 Only the sub-par display held back the Muziq from being a stronger multimedia phone. Streaming videos on Sprint TV loaded very quickly, and shuttled smoothly, but the blocky display diminished the full screen viewing capabilities of the phone.
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Motorola RAZR2 V9m - Mediocre
_it08.jpg) Streaming videos cannot be played full screen, and in fact seem to take up about half of the real estate, making them quite small. Movies in the Sprint Movie app were even smaller, about the size of a postage stamp. Video quality was okay, with some pixelation and blurriness, but the videos never stuttered or stopped during playback. Play video of Sprint TV in action...
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Samsung SPH-M610 - Mediocre
 Movies download and stream quickly, though the actual image size is tiny. On screen text such as captions or credits is laughably tiny, and long-distance shots compress faces beyond recognition. Though streaming speeds over Sprint's 3G network were excellent, image size will have to be improved to make this a hot feature.
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Samsung UpStage - Mediocre
We don't have footage of Sprint TV in action on the Samsung UpStage, which is mainly a music phone, but we did test it, and performance was comparable to the Samsung SPH-M610 above.
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Sanyo Katana DLX - Poor
 Unfortunately, the Katana DLX cannot play videos full screen. The QVGA does little to help here, as videos we watched all came out looking blurry, or even blocky, and streaming was not very smooth, after the long delay it took to begin. Many videos on Sprint's own channels simply refused to load, such as the many concert films taken at the Live Earth show, which we were interested in seeing.
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Motorola MOTOKRZR K1m - Poor
 All the streaming video we watched was very poor, some of the worst we've seen on a 3G phone, with continual stuttering and a slow streaming speed. Though accompanying sound was good, no streaming video played smoothly.
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