The Sports Illustrated Group and mobile entertainment provider Viva Vision have partnered to produce the SI Swimsuit slideshow, a mobile application featuring Sports Illustrated models wearing designer swimwear in exotic locales.

"Sports Illustrated is yet another world-class brand that has shown an interest in our proprietary slideshow application," said Maria Wich-Vila, vice president of marketing and business development for Viva Vision, Santa Monica, CA. "We're thrilled to be launching this mobile application and it's another vote of confidence for this service."

The company has also struck deals with the Spanish-language television network Univision, Car and Driver magazine and Show, a magazine targeting the African-American market.

"We're going to wait until we're live and up and running on at least three of the major tier-one carriers before we decide exactly how we're going to advertise the product, and at that point we'll create consumer marketing campaigns," Ms. Wich-Vila said.

Viva Vision's slideshow pans through a series of images separated into various categories. The platform includes interactive features that allow subscribers to pause, rewind, fast-forward and save favorite images from the slideshow and to control which content is featured by voting on their favorite images.

For example, a Model of the Week award will be chosen via voting in the application itself. The winners of these polls will be featured in the slideshow more often.

"The options for mobile image downloads have been you can either buy a wallpaper or look at a video, but only a small percentage of phones can handle full video," Ms. Wich-Vila said. "We looked at our technology and our capabilities and asked, 'What product can we make that's a best of both worlds?'

"We came up with the mobile slideshow platform to bridge the gap between wallpaper and video," she said. "It has the distribution benefits of wallpaper, which can be seen on 95 percent of handsets, but it's more engaging and consumers have access to hundreds of images per month as opposed to just one."

Viva Vision is a provider of entertainment applications and content for mobile phones including slideshows, video on demand and live video. It delivers programming via its suite of broadcast platforms and also produces its own original consumer-driven content.

"The slideshow platform is ideal for people with vast still-images libraries," Ms. Wich-Vila said. "This is a way for them to capitalize on those image libraries and give their consumers a new experience that hasn't been possible up until now."

The SI Group, which includes Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids and SI.com. Sports Illustrated has revamped its WAP site.

Consumers can download MySI Mobile on any Windows Mobile-compatible handset to get the latest information and photos related to their four favorite sports teams by texting MYSI to 58585. SI will send them a link to download the application.

MySI Mobile is part of Action Engine Corp.'s platform of mobile content services.

"A challenge of mobile advertising is that you need to be reliant on marketing with carrier partners and be targeted to make sure you're reaching their subscribers who can access the application," Ms. Wich-Vila said.

"Carriers have to decide whether they'll allow us to advertise within the application," she said. "Carriers want to control the consumer experience of an application, so it's unclear whether or not advertising will be allowed within the application. If so, the SI ad people would be in a position to sell those ads."