The claims made late last year by Qualcomm subsidiary FLO TV, that it would ship 10 million devices in 2010, had to be based on something where the great chunk of that strategy was apparent early in the year, and this was duly rolled out in the week of the Consumer Electronics show ‘ the plan is to buy into major sporting events.
FLO has signed up a list of college and professional basketball, college football, professional Baseball, hockey (by which we assume it means ice hockey) and the Soccer World Cup. It also says that it has some Nascar car racing and major Tennis events.
“Live sports are a sweet spot for FLO TV, consistently delivering some of our highest viewership numbers,” said Jonathan Barzilay, senior vice president of programming, FLO TV. “FLO TV makes it easy and convenient for sports fans to remain connected to all the action, wherever they are.”
He’s right of course. Paid for TV has live sport as its signature, but we wonder whether this is quite enough to carve out a business for both MediaFLO (the technology) and FLO, the US TV business.
In tennis it is claiming it will carry every major global event, including Wimbledon and the US Open and all this will add up to over 3,000 hours of sports programming, across 1,200 live sporting events. It has bought mobile rights to all this programming from existing holders ABC Mobile, CBS Sports, ESPN Mobile TV, Fox Mobile and NBC 2Go.
FLO listed 90 NBA games, 76 MLB games, nearly 200 NCAA football games, 350 NCAA basketball games, including championship games, 11 NHL hockey games, and 13 playoffs and the 4 tennis majors.
At the same time the company has released a mobile dongle, in the form of an upgrade to Mophie’s iPhone and iPod juice pack, effectively a spare battery which plugs into the iPhone to re-charge it. A MediaFLO chip in the device, picks up TV signals and will send them through to the Apple device. Ity doesn’t seem to use Wi-Fi, but a direct connection means it is not easily transferable to another device to other Smartphones (like the Tivit we covered elsewhere in this issue).
If this is the entire strategy, then it’s not enough, in our opinion, to drive the device to 10 million customers, and certainly not in one year, but given that the FLO Mophie Juice Pack goes on sale in AT&T stores in the first half of the year, it is part of a much needed shot in the arm for the failed US Mobile TV effort. However the rising tide behind ATSC M/H suggests that MediaFLO is only shooting for second place in the US Mobile TV wars.