@CES, Las Vegas -The Digital TV Transition in the US on February 19  will not only produce sharper pictures in the living room but will also boost TV on mobile phones.

Qualcomm, which offers its MediaFLO TV service over cell phones, said this week that the turning off of the analogue TV signals would free up spectrum and allow an expansion of its network.

It said it would make FLO TV available to more than 200m consumers across 100 markets.

Operators offering the service - Verizon and AT&T - have been cagey to date about how many subscribers are using a service that costs around $15 a month, suggesting take-up has been slow.

But Qualcomm expects that to change once the service goes nationwide and full-scale marketing begins.

The introduction of the service into cars should also help. Audiovox announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that it would put MediaFLO on in-car screens later this year. That will compete with the satellite-based service AT&T CruiseCast, which was also featured at CES.

Qualcomm also will be in competition in-car and on cell phones and other mobile devices with the Open Mobile Video Coalition. Broadcasters announced at CES that they would be offering mobile TV channels using their over-the-air digital signals. They plan a launch across 22 markets, covering 35 per cent of US TV households, later this year.

We spoke to Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm chief executive, at CES about his hopes for mobile TV in the US and globally. Edited highlights below:

Paul Jacobs: The big thing for us is we have the digital TV transition coming in February and we’ve built out markets already in anticipation of being able to turn on where we haven’t been able to because of interference from existing analogue TV stations, so we’re looking forward to that. It will take us a little while after the transition, to get the FCC certification to turn the transmitters on, but very shortly thereafter, we will be able to turn on all these other markets.

For me, the traction has not been as good as perhaps I wanted it  for MediaFLO but it’s still been good, the attach rates have been pretty good and especially given that we have not had any marketing out there. The [take-up] has not been that bad, it’s just not as big as we had hoped.

I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me when I’ve showed it them: “That’s great, when is that going to be commercially available?” Because we didn’t have a nationwide network, nationwide operators that are running and selling the service - AT&T and Verizon - don’t want to go out and do nationwide advertising, so I think, with the DTV transition, we’ll see more marketing and that’ll really solve the issue. Today we are in 65 markets, we will be in the top 100- I think we said 107 - by the end of the year.

 

Has the EU endorsement of the DVB-H standard affected your plans to compete in Europe at all?

Not really, it wasn’t a binding thing. That pressure seems to have diminished reasonably significantly, and the DVB-H guys are not doing that well. There’s a threshold you need to get over in terms of channel-switching time and I don’t think they got there. We really tried to focus on that when we developed MediaFLO and keep it under two- seconds channel-switching time, even then you get a little frustrated. So when you’re talking five or 6 seconds it’s not acceptable. And I think the economics were harder for them, it was originally conceived as piggybacking on top of the existing terrestrial broadcasters, but we found this out pretty early on that if you rollout on exactly the same towers as the broadcaster uses, it doesn’t work that well, you need something like three towers instead of one to get a good signal.

How do you think it’s going to pan out in terms of standards and geographies on a global basis? 

What we are going to end up doing is build a chip that has all the different standards, we believe we have a technical benefit, but a lot of it is political, so if somebody’s going to choose a different standard then it’s okay. We would just provide the chip and it will work for people to build in any fashion, and I think that’s the right strategy for us.

Tags: , mediaflo, qualcomm

January 11, 2009 10:58pm in Digital media, Mobile | Comment