Omar Javaid, vice president of business development for MediaFLO Technologies, has come out with a bullish prediction for take-up of mobile broadcast TV in the US. “We should be exceeding other technologies soon, I assume in a 6-month timeframe,” he said. He refused to give actual subscriber numbers or take-up rates, saying Qualcomm would do so when AT&T launched its MediaFLO service later this year. To be the leader in subscriber numbers Qualcomm needs to beat T-DMB in Korea, which reported 1.8 million users in April — with the Government announcing it plans to extend the geographical range the licences cover, which should give it a boost. To get past the smallest major contestor it would have to beat DVB-H, which has a bit more than 400,000 users, mostly in Italy, although there are far more deployments with smaller numbers so it’s difficult to get a global count. The S-DMB service in Korea is about in the middle, hitting the 1 million mark at the end of last year. I suppose I should also count 1seg, the mobile broadcast TV service in Japan which siphons off a bit of the ISDB-T network, but I have no idea how many users that has.
Qualcomm hopes to start MediaFLO services in Japan and Taiwan next year, but which stage a lot of the DVB-H services currently being trialed will be in commercial deployment. Until Qualcomm releases user figures we can’t compare different take-up rates, but Javaid appears confident that MediaFLO will get at least hundreds of thousands of viewers pretty soon. Getting 1.8 million in six months is probably overly optimistic, but as one excited industry exec said: “We don’t have to teach Americans how to watch TV”.
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