A leading MediaFLO spokesman at the IBC show this week said that its is just as bullish as it has ever been at MediaFLO about its chances of success. ‘There will be 10 million MediaFLO enabled devices by fall 2010,’ she added
Most readers of this journal will wonder if the person was an eternal optimist, an idiot or merely deluded – few would conclude that they might be right. But new management has a way of perhaps rethinking the problem and perhaps that’s what’s going on here.
On this occasion it was Vicki Mealer, the senior director of product management for MediaFLO and the level of orchestration of the MediaFLO message has to be accepted as impressive. She gave the same quote that other executives gave out throughout the conference. Someone said to us later, ‘You can say what you like about these Qualcomm folk, they don’t give up.’
The message orchestration though is down to the new guy at the operation’s head, Bill Stone, one time president of the failed Amp’d Mobile business, who took over in January.
Already he has journalists describing MediaFLO as ‘rapidly growing’ just because it has a rapidly growing build out bill, now the June freeing of its digital switchover spectrum has led to turning up the power on existing transmitters and adding more, until MediaFLO now reaches 200 million people across the leading US markets.
However there has been no declaration of a win among any of the overseas trial partners, there has been no setting aside of cash to build out the UK, where Qualcomm bought weird 1452 MHz spectrum, which would double the build out cost over UHF and yet there appears to be enthusiasm in the camp.
This enthusiasm has perhaps come from a number of clear steps which MediaFLO has announced. The first is deciding to go it alone and launch some of its own devices, which it has publicly said it will (but not yet begun) and market them directly to the US public. The other decision is to launch, in the next 45 days, an in-car service. In fact, Mealer will only admit to an in-car device, and not to the other ‘leaked’ devices on the internet, and offers a lame ‘we do not speculate on rumors’ when we push her on it.
And when we asked her about the MediaFLO approach to DVRs, she said, ‘For DVR you need a different set of rights, but there are also some issues about quality of service.’ No-one ever told TiVo that it needed extra rights for DVR, and Qualcomm very specifically doesn’t under US law.
When we point out to Mealer that ICO Communications only last year launched a failed in-car service, which used the satellite delivery of the Alcatel DVB-SH technology (which uses similar FEC outer coding as MediaFLO and probably gave just as good reception), she said simply ‘Satellite delivery is very different.’ Well sure it is, and you would need to deal with urban areas with a terrestrial component of broadcasting to get through walls, but for in-car the ICO system simply had antennas held in place by stickers on the windows, the MediaFLO system will need a special rooftop antenna. So yes satellite is very different, it appears to work better where cars are concerned, which is perhaps why Sirius has a rear seat video service from its satellite radio.
The new deal with Audiovox for this service was announced back at CES in January and will result in an in-car system which costs $500. It is hard to judge the ICO MIM service, because the company had gone into Chapter XI bankruptcy proceedings before it could really get off the ground, but we suspect that if it showed any promise, this business would have had a buyer by now.
‘There are more seat back entertainment units in the US than there are iPhones,’ said Mealer, which of course is true, about 24 million, but they are not all one brand, and that only goes to show that Qualcomm is entering a competitive market. Now if there were NONE she might have a point.
The MediaFLO system will still required monthly fees and the company is chasing the market for cars which are already out there, so doesn’t rely on new cars being sold. Perhaps Stone will go back to his Amp’d mobile contacts to contract for better music services and go up against Sirius, but that will be with what appear to be more expensive players.
But there is a sense that MediaFLO IS changing, and that’s perhaps the key to Mealer’s confidence. When she talked about KDDI in Japan which had a trial to MediaFLO, she talks in terms of the operator , ‘using it as an ancillary to ISDB-T, to deliver 30 minute video files, clips, newspapers, comics and minisodes.’
Now that’s something that we have heard many times before, and the clip casting capabilities of both MediaFLO and DVB-H always seem to be overlooked by cellular operators. There are lots of things worth broadcasting, and maybe MediaFLO needs to think far more like a satellite operator would ‘ ‘If I can’t use this to deliver one thing I’ll use it to deliver another.’
There are already rumors in the US that the company is planning to push it as an infrastructure for mobile operators to deliver other types of content.
Other Qualcomm executives have said that MediaFLO will come out with MP3 player class devices, with TV added, the same will go for handheld gaming devices, personal navigation devices and other similar platforms. But who exactly is going to let them do that? Apple, no chance. Sony with its PSP? Perhaps. Nintendo on the DS? Maybe. All three of those devices are used to deliver ISDB-T mobile TV in Japan, and a small dongle add on is all that it takes. What’s shocking is that it has taken MediaFLO so long.
Outputting wi-fi so that it can work with the iPhone appears to be the best step forwards (because there’s no way for Apple to stop this) or perhaps putting it into Android devices and finding some way to monetize the video, other than putting a subscription through an operator.
In fact MediaFLO is a FAR better way of delivering newspapers than a cellular network, since it is a broadcast application, so Kindle type file delivery is a natural here, so expect eBook periodical to come into the picture shortly as well.
It’s the same for weather reports, stock reports and the top 10 YouTube clips, which could go to ebook readers, MP3 players or even handsets, if only a PC or a handset dongle is built.
Finally the content on MediaFLO is a bit rubbish, mostly mobile subset versions of national TV stations, instead of the real thing. There is some capacity left, because the 10 channel bouquets that Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility have, overlap considerably. There was talk of a chip being built by Qualcomm which offers both ATSC M/H and MediaFLO, and the company has said it will consider this when the market is ready. But that may not be for another year.
‘Offloading NBC and Fox off onto another free to air network will give us even more capacity,’ said Mealer, ‘because there is definitely more content coming,’ she added. Yes but is it even video?