FLO TV / MediaFLO

» see flotv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

FLO TV launched as a consumer service when Verizon rolled out V CAST Mobile TV on 1 March 2007. AT&T followed on 4 May 2008. The underlying network was Qualcomm's MediaFLO, a digital broadcast standard that ran on the 700 MHz spectrum Qualcomm had bought from the FCC for $683 million. Phones with the right chipset received fourteen base channels of live television, with optional add-on tiers per carrier.

The pitch was simple. You were going to want to watch CNN, ESPN, Fox, NBC, Comedy Central on your phone. Streaming over 3G was too expensive, the data plans of 2007 measured in megabytes per month not gigabytes, and YouTube on a flip phone barely existed. Qualcomm would solve the bandwidth problem by going around the cellular network entirely, broadcasting the same stream to every receiver in range.

This service was geofenced to the United States. The handsets were locked to AT&T and Verizon CDMA networks, the broadcast towers covered roughly 100 US metro areas, and the international roaming story was nothing. In turkey i was on a turkcell sim with no chance of ever seeing a 700 MHz MediaFLO signal. by the time i would have known what FLO TV was, the iphone 3g had already shipped, and the whole product category was visibly dead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

The chrysler integration was the part that nobody could quite believe. FLO TV partnered with chrysler to put broadcast TV receivers into rear-seat entertainment systems for the Town and Country and Dodge minivans. By the end of the experiment, 851 chrysler customers in total had bought the package. Not 851 thousand. Eight hundred fifty one cars. That is the entire dealership-aftermarket footprint of FLO TV automotive.

The stand-alone FLO TV personal device went on sale in late 2009 for around 250 dollars, with a fifteen dollar monthly subscription on top. By March 2010 Qualcomm had stopped selling it. By October 2010 the company announced it was suspending new sales of the entire FLO TV service and looking for a buyer for the spectrum.

~ how it actually ended ~

AT&T announced in December 2010 it was buying Qualcomm's 700 MHz licenses for $1.93 billion. The cash went to Qualcomm, the spectrum got rolled into AT&T's LTE network, and FLO TV had a fixed shutdown date. The service ended on 27 March 2011. Existing subscribers got refunds. The transmitters were turned off and the spectrum moved into the LTE buildout that would eventually carry the streaming traffic that killed FLO TV in the first place.

~ what survived ~

FLO TV is the cleanest example of the cellular-carrier walled-garden video moment, the same window that produced i-mode in japan and Verizon V CAST in its broader form. The lesson buried with it is that broadcast topology beats unicast on bandwidth efficiency right up until the bandwidth gets cheap enough that nobody cares. Qualcomm was technically right and economically too early by about twenty-four months. The 700 MHz license ended up worth more than the entire service ever earned.

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