FLO TV: We need more phones, new services to succeed

A few weeks after Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs admitted consumer adoption of the chipmaker's FLO TV mobile broadcast unit has failed to meet expectations, FLO TV president Bill Stone said the service's future hinges on extending its parameters beyond television content into new solutions like electronic magazine delivery. "If it's only mobile TV, we're dissatisfied, we're not happy with it," Stone said in an interview with Bloomberg. "There are going to be a lot of revenue streams off this service." According to Stone, FLO TV also must expand across a wider selection of handset models, noting that Qualcomm is at work on an add-on antenna-like product that can be attached directly to phones, giving consumers the flexibility to migrate the service from device to device.

Stone also touts the FLO solution as a means for service providers and manufacturers to ease network bandwidth concerns--the FLO system transmits data across frequencies separate from those used by mobile networks, operating over the 716-722 MHz spectrum band in the U.S. "One person streaming a video takes up as much bandwidth as 100 cell phone calls," said Stone. "Networks break down and can't handle it. For me, whether I have one or 1 million users, it doesn't matter."

Speaking at the All Things Digital Conference last month, Qualcomm head Jacobs said he envisions the FLO technology will ultimately evolve into a more general data delivery platform for connected devices, not limited to mobile video. To illustrate the point, Jacobs demonstrated Mirasol, a new solution enabling handsets and related devices to display text content comparable to e-readers like Amazon.com's Kindle, but with added features like color and video.

For more on FLO TV's future:
- read this Bloomberg article

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