Sprint elected some time ago to eschew the MediaFLO TV services of its competitors AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and now its mobile TV strategy is becoming much more clear. Sprint is skipping multicast TV in favor of on-demand unicast, signing a deal with ABC-Disney to offer some of its most popular programs for streaming download over its Sprint TV service.

Just as Sprint is trying to turn its music store into a mobility-added competitor of digital music sellers like Apple’s iTunes it appears to be doing the same for video. The message is fairly clear: You buy a 3G phone, sign up for a data plan and you can do whatever you can do on your iPod—and you can do it wirelessly. Sprint is still a long way from the content library that Apple has built up in its video store or from the sheer amount of programming that is available via the MediaFLO service, but shows like “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” are nothing to scoff at. What’s more, Disney is bring its Disney Channel children’s content to the phone in the fall.

What makes the service even more interesting is how Sprint is charging for it. Though this kind of full-episode treatment screams premium service, Sprint isn’t charging incrementally for it. It’s only requiring a data plan, albeit one of its most expensive Power Vision data plans at $20 a month. In addition, Disney and Sprint will augment that revenue with ads inserted in the shows. The key for Sprint appears to be to drive customers to bigger and bigger data plans each month as its per-minute voice revenue declines. We saw similar moves at CTIA Wireless when Sprint dropped prices for a standard music download to $1 if customers signed up for a Power Vision plan.

If Sprint can build up its library, bringing in content from other broadcasters, it will have a very compelling service, basically becoming the only purveyor of prime-time content on-demand in the wireless industry. The question is, can its networks support it? 42-minute TV dramas will drain an awful lot of capacity, even with EV-DO. Perhaps this yet another reason Sprint is pursuing its WiMAX strategy. It seems to following a strategy of offering its customers gobs and gobs of high-bandwidth services. It will need a high-bandwidth network to back up that strategy.

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.