NAB wouldn’t be NAB in the last few years if every Mobile TV adherent didn’t hold back its gems for the show, and Qualcomm with its ailing and failing FLO TV is no exception, citing new applications including web interactivity, phone based DVRs and social network integration.
‘With consumers’ mobile entertainment habits evolving rapidly, FLO TV will be integrating its current live linear video with relevant, on-demand content and interactive features that complement the programming viewers are watching in real-time,’ said Bill Stone, president of FLO TV.
What Stone seems to be saying is that VoD will magically be added to the service, along with links to web based content. FLO TV also added pay-per-day and event passes, and time-shifted viewing options.
A few years back it was the rather conservative, now deposed, FLO leaders who convinced us at Faultline that DVRs have no place in a mobile device ‘ pointing out the disappointment of your portable device failing to record some vital part of a program (the winning goal?) when you were driving through a tunnel with no signal. But Stone is clearly not put off by this and perhaps the technology has moved on slightly so that damaged FLO files, once stored, can be repaired by calling across the cellular network for lost packets. That was the direction that the research was going in at the time. Presumably the VoD that FLO is talking about is down to this and it may well create a Push VoD service which automatically pushes the most popular programming to your portable device.
FLO says that interactive features that will enable users to interact with programming and advertising, allowing consumers to click for more information about a show or click to buy an advertised product. How about voting on shows too? Again it requires the cellular return path, but given that both AT&T and Verizon already supposedly support FLO, this should not be a problem (they are supposed to support it but have sold an alarmingly low number of customers, which are declining if you take Qualcomm segment revenues as a guideline). AT&T, Verizon and Qualcomm offer a variety of FLO TV packages from $10 to around $15 a month.