Cingular’s new Cingular Video (CV) service has good bones—it delivers content clearly, cleanly and efficiently. That said, it needs to become available on a wider variety of phones and in more cities before it can truly compete with Sprint and Verizon.

CV works only on Cingular’s two 3G phones, the Samsung SGH-ZX10 and the LG CU320. And those phones are sold only in the 16 metropolitan areas where Cingular currently has UMTS high-speed coverage. That’s a pity, because the service actually works all over the nation using Cingular’s EDGE network (though not quite as smoothly as it does in UMTS cities).

There’s no subscription fee for Cingular’s content, though the carrier recommends you have a $19.99-per-month unlimited-data plan to avoid getting hit with huge data charges. Music videos, HBO, and HBO Family content all cost extra.

Cingular’s video menu is a WAP site, so it loads much more slowly than other services’ menus do. This is disappointing, and sometimes frustrating. But there is a useful “My Cingular” link that lets you build a list of favorite channels so you don’t have to burrow through the slow menus.

News, sports, and children’s programming are strengths of Cingular’s all-clips deck. CNN, NBC, and FOX supply news and Disney, Muppets, and HBO Family (the last one $2.99 per month extra) have plenty of kids’ clips. I was also happy to see 19 music videos for a flat $4.99 per month, a plan much preferable to the extortionate per-video prices of Verizon V Cast’s video service. But Cingular’s flagship HBO content is extremely disappointing—short recycled clips and lukewarm behind-the-scenes interviews from HBO shows.

When I tested Cingular Video in Baltimore (a UMTS city), videos were smoother and buffered less often than on other services. Talking heads had spot-on lip-sync. In New York, where I connected with the slower EDGE network, videos took longer to start up than they did on Verizon’s service—an average of about 21 seconds of buffering compared with 10.2 seconds on Verizon V Cast Video. But considering that EDGE is one-fifth the speed of Verizon and Sprint’s EV-DO network, I was startled to see that Cingular’s load times weren’t that far behind Sprint’s.

Cingular’s bare-bones video service needs some more flesh on it. This means more compelling content, but especially more handsets and more cities. That will come later this year—and if Cingular can build on its smooth content delivery, it might have a winner on its hands.

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