Is Qualcomm planning to spin off or even sell MediaFLO, asks Red Herring. San Diego, California-based Qualcomm, which committed $800 million to its U.S. mobile TV network, has hired a new senior VP and general manager for MediaFLO Technologies, TV veteran Neville Meijers.
According to Telephony, Qualcomm doubled its number of handsets on the market, going from two to four, on Verizon’s V-Cast service. MediaFlo-enabled handsets now including the Motorizr Z6tv, LG’s Voyager, Samsung SCH-u620 and the LG VX9400.
The “F-L-O” in MediaFLO stands for Forward Link Only, meaning that the data transmission path is one-way, from the tower to the device. In the United States, the MediaFLO system uses 716-722MHz, which was previously allocated to UHF TV Channel 55. It pumps out some 50,000 watts, EIRP.
But the company’s guarantee that we’d have more options from various vendors by last year’s holiday season was never fulfilled. AT&T also said they would launch a MediaFLO-powered mobile TV handset in the fourth quarter of last year.
Now it is February and there are still no signs of MediaFLO on AT&T. The carrier would be hard pressed not to launch the service before or at CTIA Wireless 2008, which gets underway April 1, says RCR News.
According to Joe Nordgaard, director of wireless consulting firm Spectral Advantage, “Mobile TV is not really part of Qualcomm’s core business, and one of the key indicators of a spin-off is having the right talent on board to run it as a standalone business,” he said.
In 1999 Qualcomm sold its base station business to Ericsson and its cell phone manufacturing operation to Kyocera.
The TV business with its complex interrelationships among international content owners, networks, broadcasters, and regulators, is even further removed from Qualcomm’s core business, so a spin-off is highly likely, Mr. Nordgaard said.
Still, somebody has bid $900mm for the 700 MHz E Block spectrum this month. If not Qualcomm, who?
In related news, the DVB-SH standard has been demonstrated in the S-Band for Mobile TV. Sagem Mobiles said it would provide its “SAGEM myMobileTV” handsets, empowered by DiBcom’s DVB-SH receiver prototypes.
The DVB-SH standard (Digital Video Broadcasting from Satellite to Handhelds), is designed to complement DVB-H in higher frequency bands. The S-Band, at 2.2GHz, is adjacent to the UMTS band, thus allowing to reuse the existing cellular sites, towers and antennas.
Europe’s S-Band space segment is owned by a joint venture company of Eutelsat and SES Astra and is due to be launched in the first quarter of 2009.
In February 2007 the European Commission confirmed that 30 MHz of S-Band spectrum could be used for mobile satellite services and that complementary ground components of a hybrid satellite/terrestrial system are also permitted. An S-Band payload on the W2A satellite will deliver DVB-SH services over France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK (pdf). The system is similar to the MBSAT network (below) that has been a success in South Korea.
ICO’s DVB-SH initiative in the United States expects to deploy a fully-integrated DVB-SH hybrid satellite/terrestrial network in North America this year, with Alcatel-Lucent as the end-to-end network integrator for the project.
Meanwhile, PacketVideo has launched a Mobile Broadcast Receiver which is a smallish device that receives DVB-H signals, and then streams them out over WiFi. The mobile broadcast receiver will be available in versions for all major mobile broadcast standards, including TDtv, DVB-H and MediaFLO as well as for WiMAX. It’s compatible with many WiFi-enabled phones including the Nokia N-series, Apple iPhone and HTC Smartphones. The self-contained receiver features a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and will be available later this year.
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