Europe UK : ROK launched Monkey Sports News, available on both ROK TV and FreeBe TV.  The channel brings live sports news television to 2.5G handsets in the UK, US, China, Thailand and Turkey and will be sublicensed to partner Telco’s worldwide in South Africa, Thailand and Pakistan.

Monkey Sport News, aimed and both men and women, takes a live text feed of up to the minute sports news and uses a speech recognition software programme developed by ROK to lip synch the stories, which are read by quirky computer generated animals. The channel is fronted by anchorman Ted ‘the rocket’ Burner.

The sports channel will compliment its sister channel, Monkey News Network which delivers live news bulletins from around the world, updated every 15 minutes.

Bruce Renny, Marketing Director for ROK comments, “Aside from catering to the traditional male sports demographic, we have designed Monkey Sports News in a fun and quirky way to also appeal to the growing demographic of female sport enthusiasts.  In the past three months alone, ROK has seen a twenty percent increase in the consumption of sport content by women, across our mobile TV services.”

Other channels in ROK’s current extensive and cross-genre content line-up include ITN, National Geographic, Pop World, Fifth Gear and SNTV, among many others.

ROK Entertainment’s patent-pending technology delivers video streaming to mobile phones over mass-market 2.5G GPRS at a faster frame rate than any existing 3G TV service.