The producers of the hit TV series 24, which airs on Fox Entertainment Group's Fox Broadcasting network, are creating short, promotional videos that will be broadcast to cell phone customers who sign up to receive them. The free, one-minute videos won't be clips from the existing show but rather mini-dramas based on the series, using different actors.

They'll first be made available via Vodafone's U.K. wireless service in January, coinciding with the launch of 24's fourth season. In the U.S., Fox parent News Corp. has a deal with Verizon Wireless, partly owned by Vodafone, to make the videos available to customers using its new 3G high-speed service, which should be available in the first half of next year. These kinds of promotional streaming videos are expected to start popping up on cell phones all over the U.S. in 2005, as providers like Cingular, the BellSouth -SBC Communications joint venture, also roll out 3G services.

Welcome to the latest marriage of entertainment and marketing. These mobile episodes, or "mobisodes" as they've been dubbed, will serve an astonishing array of functions in 60 seconds: They will entertain, promote a TV series and pitch 3G services, as well as the fancy phones we need to use them.

Marketers are betting that if the content is short, entertaining and, of course, free, consumers will sign up for videos like 24. They point to similar text-messaging campaigns: Mobile Media North America runs a program for The Walt Disney Co.'s ABC networks called Soap [Confidential], which gives fans text-message alerts and inside scoops on All My Children, General Hospital and One Life to Live.

Neither Disney nor Mobile Media will disclose fan numbers for Soap [Confidential]. But a previous text-message campaign for All My Children's Sexiest Man in America Contest drew some 2.5 million online and text-message votes. Fans also sent in more than 2,000 other text messages during the contest. Mobile Media is also partnered with News Corp., Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Communications and The Weather Channel.

And it may not matter to cell customers that they are using their minutes to watch an ad. "As long as the programming is relevant to consumers, they don't really consider it marketing," says Chris Colburn, an executive at Interpublic Group's interactive marketing unit R/GA, who is not involved with the 24 project. "Especially if it's something that they've opted into."

In a world of TiVo and pop-up blockers, he says, advertising will increasingly be presented using media that's requested, or pulled, by consumers rather than pushed at them.

The mobisode format won't be limited to existing programming. "These programming spots will be most effective when they are unique spinoffs of a known property that's only available via cell phone," says Colburn, "as opposed to re-purposing something that you can already see on TV."

And that property doesn't have to be a TV show. "Any consumer product company could create their own mobisodes," says Colburn, and they will, using the same stars that headline their commercials. A Nike spot could star Michael Jordan, while one for PepsiCo might feature Britney Spears.

"Savvy advertisers," adds Colburn, "will create free content that can be sent to cell phones in advance of the paid versions coming to market."