In a joint announcement on Wednesday, Verizon Wireless and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO said they will broadcast 100 live college football games this fall on V CAST Mobile TV, Verizon’s mobile TV service.

Through this marriage of mobile TV and one of America’s most popular sports, the two firms are hoping that mobile TV, a technology with immense potential but an unimpressive resume, will finally prove its commercial viability.

It will not be the first go-round for mobile TV and college football.

About a year ago Mobile ESPN offered college sports streamed to cell phones, but the mobile service was shuttered by ESPN’s parent company The Disney Company a few weeks after the announcement.

The service has since been reincarnated as a channel on V CAST Mobile TV.

Mobile networks such as V CAST Mobile TV have offered hundreds of hours of rebroadcasted TV fare such as comedies, news, music, and even sports scores, but to date consumer response has been disappointing.

“The problem is mobile broadcast feels a lot like 1975, with only a handful of channels and no on-demand video viewing,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “The best bet for mobile TV is live events about which people are passionate, and college sports are perfect examples.”

The live broadcast of this year's college basketball tournament, affectionately known as March Madness, proved to be one of the most popular live events viewed on the Internet in the U.S., and many are hoping for some of the same results on the mobile network.

“The nice thing about sports is that they have schedules and they are not subject to the random interests of the market, so if you are going to break mobile TV out of the gate, sports is a good place to start,” said John Gauntt, an analyst with eMarketer.

There is a lot at stake, Mr. Gauntt said, because marketers are excited by the advertising possibilities inherent in mobile TV.

“It’s the perfect venue for a combination of both brand and direct response marketing,” he said. “Unlike TV, people’s attention is engaged on that little screen and that’s what excites marketers.”

Verizon Wireless, which runs its V CAST Mobile TV service on Qualcomm’s Media FLO network, does not publish subscription numbers for its service, so it’s difficult to assess the popularity of the service.

But mobile TV has found a milestone of sorts in Europe, according to Mr. Gauntt.

In soccer-mad Italy, the mobile broadcast of the 2006 FIFA World Cup resulted in more than 111,000 customers subscribing to 3 Italia’s World Cup mobile broadcast in the six weeks leading up to the tournament.

“3 Italia has established the current benchmark for live sports on mobile TV so I am pretty sure that if live college football proves successful, you will hear about it from Verizon,” he said.

Verizon and Qualcomm will get a running start this fall since Mobile ESPN, a network with immense experience in mobile broadcasting, will air 75 of the games.

“Because of their experience, albeit expensive experience, ESPN Mobile has a lot of solid mobile-savvy DNA already baked inside,” Mr. Gauntt said. “So when it comes to fine-tuning the broadcast for the tiny cell phone screen, Mobile ESPN gives the project its best possible packaging.”