Bill Stone, the head of Qualcomm’s FLO TV mobile television business, says FLO will offer less expensive plans directly to consumers, rather than through cellular operators, according to The New York Times’ Bits blog. Also, FLO plans to offer service to handsets that aren’t designed for mobile TV.
Stone says an annual plan sold by FLO to consumers will probably cost less than $10 a month, the article says. Also, there might be other plans, such as per-month pricing of about $10 and one-day use for $5.
Those seem pretty good prices to me. However, if it’s a choice of spending $5 for one day versus $10 for an entire month, the latter is a much better deal. Cellular operators typically charge at least $15 a month for FLO, as well as for data service.
Transferring FLO to phones via WiFi
Qualcomm also wants to enable cellular phones that don’t have a FLO chip — which most do not — to receive its programs, Bits says. The company will sell a “keychain size gizmo” that receives the signals and transfers them to a handset via WiFi.
That brings back a memory: On March 12, 2008 I wrote in this weblog that Packet Video, which is owned by Nextwave Wireless, was developing a small, external receiver that could receive mobile TV programs and transfer the signals to WiFi-enabled phones. I noted that the receiver would work with FLO (formerly called MediaFLO) as well as DVB-H and TDtv.
At the time I wrote the article, the receiver was, supposedly, compatible with Nokia Nseries phones, the Apple iPhone and HTC smartphones. The receiver certainly wasn’t as small as a keychain, but after more than a year of development, Packet Video might have been able to reduce the size.
I haven’t read any article that mentions the Packet Video device in conjunction with FLO. If FLO is using that device, perhaps you will have read it here first!
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