Gadget blogs everywhere in the US have been repeating a story that was probably first heard on GDGT, which is that US mobile TV service MediaFLO is about to begin selling a portable media player which can receive its US mobile TV services. Qualcomm will introduce the FLO TV Personal Television, a device which appears to looks like an iPhone (of course it does, it’s has to have one flat touch screen).
The blogs say that it has a capacitive touchscreen, with swipe gesture control, just 4GB of memory, stereo speakers, and enough battery life for 300 hours standby, 5 hours of TV, and 15 hours of music.
Back when Qualcomm first signed its distribution deal with Verizon (2005) we asked the MediaFLO team if it would come out with any devices with which to view MediaFLO services which were not also phones. We were told very clearly that this was Verizon’s decision and that MediaFLO would do nothing to jeopardize that relationship. Well 4 years and very few subscriptions later, MediaFLO cares less what Verizon thinks (though its parent Qualcomm might care considerably) and it has stated publicly that it will go direct to the consumer with an offering.
However if these blogs have the device pegged right, its can also store music. We know from discussions with MediaFLo that it doesn’t really believe in portable devices storing broadcast video, mostly because of the chances of losing a key part of a reception when you drive through a tunnel, and 4 GB is an anemic amount of video storage (around 16 hours at best) so we guess that MediaFLO will broadcast music, like any digital radio service and allow it to be stored on the device in the same way that the satellite radios can on Sirius XM.
What MediaFLO really needs is a portable tuner for an iPhone, which connects via Wi-Fi, because that would put MediaFLO onto a platform with the right kind of customer profile, people that have the money and incentive for paid entertainment on the move. So far there is no movement on that front from MediaFLO, but given that almost every other mobile TV effort around the world has come to market with an option to include an iPhone, it is just a matter of time, especially since neither Apple, nor the exclusive US operator AT&T, can do anything about stopping it, not without severing the Wi-Fi contact that the App Store and iTunes so relies on.
But this step pushes Qualcomm further and further out of its comfort zone. Typically Qualcomm will enter any business that will eventually lead to it selling more chips ‘ in this case MediaFLO chips. It has experiments in screen technology, banking software, purchase recommendation software and M2M services and they all allow it to sell more chips in the long run. But in MediaFLO we have a service which has not taken off, and now a device relying on a service which has not taken off.
If you look hard at just why MediaFLO in particular and mobile TV in general have not taken off in the US, it is down to content. The broadcasting businesses were quick off the mark with mobile content and began to shape their offerings for mobile. So none of the TV channels that MediaFLO carries are true broadcasts, but instead are edited snippets of other TV channels, which deliberately keep the best parts on broadcast TV.
It must be noted that CBS Mobile, Fox Mobile and ESPN Mobile are not terrestrial channels, but composite made for mobile channels, which are also marketed with SMS alerts of their own. CBS carries football, baseball and basketball, and mobile web access to results and clips and Fox is more entertainment and drama such as Bones, 24 and Prison Break plus some football. ESPN tends to be made up of lots of classic sporting moments, and very few live ones. So almost all of this can be categorized as sport updates after-the-fact, and little or no live sport, which is reserved for existing streaming channels or kept off the mobile altogether, although we have heard that some of the content on these channels are slowly changing.
The problem is that these were all developed from the time when streamed MPEG2 content was the order of the day on phones, when the bandwidth they used up was enormous and the picture poor, and viewing times miniscule. That has all now changed, but content has not kept up.
It is this and this alone that has stopped MediaFLO from selling, and if Qualcomm wants to fix this it has to go out and convince content owners that it should have access to prime time, top content, and perhaps pay an awful lot for that content.
When we last spoke in depth to MediaFLO it was saying that once the analog switchover happened in the US it would finally have nationwide coverage which would stimulate Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility to put some advertising weight behind its proposition and it would also add more high value content. Neither have happened and since then MediaFLO has had a new management team. But until it fixes its content problems putting out new devices on their own will not suddenly make MediaFLO sell.