With a gigantic smorgasbord of content, Sprint TV delivers channels for every taste. Although its pricing plan seems designed to repel rather than reward folks who want to sample its fabulous buffet, those who are willing to slog through will be rewarded. The video quality is not tremendously better than that of other services, but the wide range of content makes Sprint TV the best mobile video service available right now.

Sprint TV's deck is huge—so huge that it took me two full days just to catalog the thing. A carrier's deck is the tiny, abbreviated menu you use to choose content such as ringtones, games, and video content. Companies jockey for position on the deck because being on the first screen of a content deck can mean significantly higher sales. There are 20 channels of linear TV, ten different music providers offering different packages of radio and video-clip channels, five sports-news providers, and five packages devoted entirely to short films and viral videos. The one area where it's a little thin is national news; they have CNN, FOX, and ABC, but I'd like to have seen NBC as well. But Sprint is the only carrier with local video news from cities around the nation.

Sprint TV Live is the carrier's flagship package, and it's unique: 20 linear TV channels, including Discovery, Discovery Kids, The Weather Channel, TLC, C-SPAN, and FOX News—those channels show exactly what's being shown on TV at the moment—and mobile-only channels such as Comedy Time, MLB Highlights, and four music-video channels, all of which are multihour tape loops. The channels are easy to flip between; once you're in the package, just hit the Up or Down key on your phone's cursor pad to switch channels. That's much easier than poking through menus.

Beyond Sprint TV, the carrier has 43 different packages of clips, each with its own separate monthly subscription fee, from The Street TV ($4.99 per month for 33 clips at a time devoted to surfing, skateboarding, and hip-hop) to Sony Music Box Connection (entire albums of Sony artists and nine radio stations, for $5.95 per month) and MSpot Movies (16 complete movies at a time, either old or hideously bad, at $6.95 per month). The problem is that because there's no program guide, there's no way to sample channels unless you're willing to spend $243 per month on video services. Sprint provides quick montages of content, but they're not informative enough.

Sprint's pricing plans are baffling. You pay $15 per month to enter its buffet, which offers you little content: one TV channel (ABC News Now), one streaming radio channel (Sirius Hits), and the opportunity to buy more. The "Power Vision Plus Pack," for $5 per month more, gets you five live channels. The "Ultimate Pack," for another $10 per month, gets you a few more live channels and a range of news, sports, and entertainment clips. Both are separate from the $9.99-per-month Sprint TV Live selection and from the 43 other clip packages.

Sprint is also the home of WNI Live Local, a separate, $4.99-per-month service that brings clips from local news channels in eight cities to your phone. Many more cities are on their way. WNI said they're working with Cingular and Verizon to bring the service live on those carriers, but right now you have to go to Sprint to get local video news.

Quality is decent, but I wish it was better. Sprint's clip channels took 18.8 seconds on average to buffer, compared with Verizon's 10.2 seconds, and they had to rebuffer a lot more frequently than Verizon's channels did. Sprint's service also sometimes broke up into partial frames rather than smoothly writing new images.

As wireless carriers move to even faster networks and better delivery, Sprint is in the best position to provide the range of video content we would expect from truly "mobile" TV. Other vendors may try to catch up in the content area, but right now Sprint offers more programming than anyone else.