Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs told the NAB conference in Las Vegas that the company is happy to work with broadcasters to bring local TV content to mobile phones. Jacobs said that Qualcomm always intended to include local content in its services, but critics of MediaFLO claimed that it would be prohibitively expensive to do it via that technology, reports Broadcasting Cable. “Qualcomm will either have to grab local content from stations nationwide and route it back via fiber to its San Diego operations center, then transmit it via satellite…or take the potentially more costly step of developing local insertion centers in each market that could ingest local broadcast content and then retransmit it using MediaFLO’s Ch. 55 spectrum”. Of course, they’re promoting their own in-band mobile DTV technology, and were undoubtedly delighted when Jacobs said Qualcomm was willing to put their technology onto its chipsets: “We’re about putting more capabilities on the phone, as that drives our core chipset business. So the more capabilities, the better. We look forward to working with you.” That’s hardly surprising considering it has already announced a chipset supporting arch-rival technology DVB-H.
Apparently Mark Aitken, a technology executive with Sinclair Broadcast Group who is heavily involved with mobile DTV and broadcasters’ new Open Mobile Video Coalition, spoke with Jacobs after the keynote and told him Sinclair CEO David Smith would like to meet with him about the issue and Jacobs expressed interest in setting up a meeting.
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