End of FLO TV and Mobile TV

After six years and spending more than two billion dollars, Qualcomm finally signaled it may give up its costly adventure; FLO TV. Paul Jacobs mentioned, “You know, there are people who love it, but the numbers are not nearly what we expected”. Well, there people who are interested in anything, it is the number of those people that makes the difference. Although technology companies try to make it a technology issue, in reality mobile TV failure is a consumer issue. The hype started around 2002 when mobile data networks were mushrooming all around the world without any killer application in the horizon. While most of the operators were migrating to 3G, data network utilization was less than 10%. Operators were spending their CapEx for data coverage enhancement, but analysts and people familiar with mobile traffic engineering were wondering what is going to fill the promised “fat pipes”. Mobile TV and different flavors of it; including parallel broadcasting networks like FLO TV, came out of the shadows as the messiah of data networks; the ultimate killer application that will utilize all mobile data channels. After years of underutilization and expensive investment, it was during 2008-2009 time period that finally thanks to iPhone and other smartphones data networks started to find their killer application and ultimate usage. Mobile TV was just a promise for a very sad period of time for mobile data networks. Those days are passed and belong to history; same as mobile TV.