There was precious little discussion of movement in mobile TV technologies or deals throughout Mobile World Congress, but one or two items slipped out.
Perhaps the most significant is the fact that not only does Qualcomm believe that its FLO TV service is not dead, but it also thinks the technology is not dead. It launched a new version of MediaFLO called FLO-EV, it has shown off a smartbook with FLO TV on it, and rumors continue to circulate that MediaFLO would suddenly win out on one of the international opportunities that it has been banging on about for the past four years.
Let’s take them in reverse order. No we have NOT heard that KDDI is planning to build out in Japan, but we heard the rumor so many times at Mobile World Congress last week, that it must have either a) been a leak or b) been planted as a rumor by Qualcomm to strengthen its story. We think the latter more likely, but would not swear by it.
FLO has had trials in the UK, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan and one or two other places, but right now Qualcomm has almost become as bigoted on its own technology as Nokia once was about DVB-H. FLO has one network, in the US, with less users than emerged in the Netherlands for DVB-H in three months. The company has wasted something close to $1 billion. It is one of the gambles that never paid off for it, it is time to move on and stop losing money on it. Qualcomm has never understood that it could endorse ATSC M/H and become the conduit to introduce the broadcast community to the mobile industry and end up triggering, and potentially owning, mobile TV in the US.
However in Japan it continues to test a USB dongle which can output directly to a PC or other wi-fi device, for MediaFLO, even though it only has an experimental VHF license with KDDI and sends out a single trial channel in a limited area.
So instead of jumping onto the major Mobile TV platforms like ISDB-T, where it has no design wins, Qualcomm continues to plant rumors of its imminent success, buy adverts during the US superbowl and spends R&D dollars on introducing a successor technology.
Qualcomm says that FLO-EV is intended primarily for international markets, designed to help wireless operators lower the deployment costs for delivering multimedia content to mobile devices. So it’s designed for a market that has zero successes. We may be able to conclude from this that a design win is imminent, and that KDDI has asked for it to be a little more efficient, or that perhaps this is what Qualcomm wants us to think and there is no such design win on the horizon.
Even in using the EV moniker, it suggests that this technology is somehow related to EV-DO, which is a the data only portion of CDMA2000 base station transmission, but sadly it is not. If it was a multicast version of EV-DO (there is a standard for this called BCMCS ‘ Broadcast Multicast Services) then it might go some way to altering the economics of the industry. KDDI tried BCMCS transmissions as far back as 2006, but no TV service came from it, so we presume there is an obstacle there (like it doesn’t work).
But FLO is simply an updated version of the separate FLO OFDM broadcasting technology, not a way of dropping broadcast signals onto the cellular signal.
Neville Meijers, senior vice president and general manager of MediaFLO Technologies. ‘FLO-EV is the result of our continued innovation and dedication to providing the most compelling and technically advanced offering to both wireless operators and mobile media consumers.’
FLO-EV has an enhanced air interface which gives it between 3 and 5 dB improvement in performance if all other factors are equal. This can translate into a 30% to 50% percent improvement in one of two things, the amount of TV channels it can carry, or the cost of deploying the network, since signals can effectively be picked up accurately further away or through more obstacles.
The only other significant mobile TV event at the show was the presence of a ZTE DVB-H device, which we did not see (though we spoke to about four people who had seen it), which will come out shortly, undercutting the existing Nokia, Samsung and LG devices.