Jefferson Graham
USA Today
“People love to watch TV, wherever they are, and will pay for the privilege,” says Gina Lombardi, the president of MediaFlo, at the company’s San Diego operations center. “Leave the big screen at home, and take your TV with you, anywhere you go.” By Robert Benson for USA TODAY
SAN DIEGO — MediaFlo President Gina Lombardi is showing off her TV studio. More than 100 TV monitors display satellite feeds from CBS, NBC, Fox and cable networks, all being rebroadcast — to cellphones.
MediaFlo USA, a subsidiary of cellphone chipmaker Qualcomm, has quietly set up a broadcast TV network to bring prime-time shows to customers of Verizon Wireless’ VCast service, and soon to Cingular customers.
Unlike prior mobile TV offerings, VCast Mobile TV is full of complete prime-time fare, including shows such as CBS’ CSI, NCIS and Survivor, NBC’s The Office and Heroes, Fox’s House and late-night comedy shows from David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart.
“Leave the big screen at home, and take your TV with you, anywhere you go,” Lombardi says.
VCast Mobile, which runs on MediaFlo’s network, costs $15 a month on top of phone charges. The Samsung phone is $149 with a two-year contract, after the $50 rebate. The LG phone is $199 with a two-year contract, after a $50 rebate.
Verizon Mobile TV was first announced in January with great fanfare at the Consumer Electronics Show. It was launched quietly earlier this month in 22 cities, including Las Vegas, Seattle, Dallas, Omaha, Jacksonville and Norfolk, Va.
Verizon added another market this week, Orlando, as it promotes the service at the CTIA Wireless industry trade show that began Tuesday.
MediaFlo isn’t the first TV service for cellphones. Oakland-based MobiTV has amassed 2 million paying subscribers since it was launched three years ago. It works with Sprint and Cingular phones.
Lombardi argues that her service offers a faster, more reliable picture and that switching between channels on the phone is akin to remote-control quality. There’s no delay.
“It’s the best-quality video I’ve ever seen on a cellphone,” says Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president of CBS’ mobile division, which is working with MediaFlo. “It’s a real breakthrough for wireless.”
In putting its ambitious network together, Qualcomm looked to an old technology: broadcasting via over-the-air UHF signals.
Active in the wireless industry since its earliest days, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs says he and engineers used to fantasize about new uses for cellphones, dreaming that one day they could be used for mass broadcasting.
That became a reality when the Federal Communications Commission announced an auction for UHF properties, and he jumped. Overnight, “We had most of the country covered,” he says.
The company acquired the license for unused UHF channel 55 from the FCC and one private party for $38 million.
During testing on the system, Jacobs says, doubting colleagues said consumers would never stand for watching long-form video content on a phone with a small screen.
Jacobs says he was told: “People can’t walk around watching TV on a phone — they’ll trip.”
But he wasn’t swayed. “You get the best opportunities when everybody makes assumptions about your failure,” he says. “People don’t relate to TV on the phone differently than they relate to TV … because it’s still television — on the phone.”
As part of its VCast service, Verizon has offered clips from shows such as Fox’s 24. But Lombardi says the idea from the beginning was for MediaFlo to be simulcast TV with fuller programming.
“We wanted a network that everybody could see at the same time,” she says. “We felt that was a missing need.”
Verizon will begin marketing VCast Mobile TV in Verizon stores in coming weeks, says chief marketing officer Mike Lanman.
“This is mobile TV like they’ve never seen before,” he says. “It’s such a visible difference, the only way to get the message across is to show it to them.”
Verizon is still marketing VCast clips for music videos, sports and weather as an “on-demand” service. A monthly bundle with VCast Mobile TV and Internet access is $25 on top of phone charges.
A new chip
In addition to acquiring the UHF signals, Qualcomm invented a new kind of chip to pick up TV on cellphones. It licensed the chips to handset manufacturers Samsung and LG. Then it launched broadcast TV towers in major cities and signed Verizon as its first customer. Cingular will launch later this year.
Competitor MobiTV has been hampered by super-slow video signals. But CEO Phillip Alvelda says the service is just as speedy as MediaFlo when used on the newest, state-of-the-art cellphones. “Qualcomm has the luxury of working with two custom phones in 20 markets,” he says. “We’re in every market, on many, many phones.”
MobiTV has proved that customers will pay for TV programming on their cellphones. But Linda Barrabee, an analyst at researcher the Yankee Group, says that is still a tiny fraction of the overall wireless audience.
This year, she predicts growth to 6.6% of customers, from 2.4% last year and 0.7% in 2005.
“That’s a healthy jump,” she says. “But overall, while I think consumers would like to be entertained by their cellphone in their down time, the price is just too high right now for anyone beyond early adopters.”
Jacobs and Lombardi wave off such concerns.
“You can’t always be at home,” says Lombardi. “People love to watch TV, wherever they are, and will pay for the privilege.”