Qualcomm Aims To Start Mobile Video In Japan in ’08

Jun Yamada, the president of Qualcomm’s Japan unit, said he was “optimistic” that the Japanese government would allocate sufficient frequency bands to launch the MediaFLO service in the country “given that there’s a great need for such multimedia broadcasting services”.
Qualcomm has formed a joint venture with KDDI to test MediaFLO, and also convinced Softbank to trial the technology.
“The operators are yet to figure out ways to generate revenue, whether it’s charging the consumers or creating a new advertisement model,” Yamada said…Yamada also said his company may take minority stakes in content providers and other related companies to help develop and distribute programmes on MediaFLO.”
Qualcomm is also following its dual-chip policy in Japan, indicating plans to market a chip at the start of next year that will receive both MediaFLO and One-Seg signals, for phones to be available as early as 2008. It’s a clear tactic by Qualcomm to ensure that handset manufacturers don’t have to choose one technology or another, so the company can get a good number of MediaFLO handsets into the market.

Comments have been disabled for this post