Many of the nation’s leading TV station groups have gotten together under the banner of the Open Mobile Video Coalition to develop a standard for in-band mobile video and a viable business model to go with it.

The members of the coalition envision using a portion of their DTV signals to broadcast one or two channels of high-quality TV channels to handheld devices, laptops and receivers in moving cars.

It would be the carry-out version of the service American viewers have gotten used to for all these years in their homes.

Great idea. They only problem is somebody else has already beat them to it—Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, a technology provider and mobile programming wholesaler.

In partnership with MediaFLO USA, Verizon Wireless last March launched V Cast Mobile TV, offering eight linear channels with mix-and-match programming from CBS, Fox, Comedy Central, ESPN, NBC, NBC News, MTV and Nickelodeon.

For owners of certain video-ready LG and Samsung phones, the service goes for an extra $15 dollars a month, $25 with unlimited access to video clips from the same content providers.

And there is more MediaFLO TV coming. Later this year, perhaps in October, AT&T will begin offering a comparable service to its subscribers.

There are other mobile technologies out there, but what should make MediaFLO particularly interesting to broadcasters is that it’s based on the same UHF spectrum with which they are familiar.

Omar Javaid is VP of business development for the MediaFLO technologies. In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Javaid discusses the MediaFLO technology and services.

While MediaFLO may be competitive with broadcasters in-band mobile ambitions, he says, parent Qualcomm may be supportive of it.

Describe the MediaFLO business model and how it works with the content suppliers and wireless carriers.

We bought UHF spectrum at auction and now own channel 55 UHF nationwide. We created a service provider, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary called MediaFLO USA Inc.

The best way to think about MediaFLO USA is as a wholesale pay TV operator. MediaFLO USA does the content deals, it has all the operational facilities, it owns all the networks and infrastructure, it runs all of the transmitters.

So it’s like a DirecTV or a Comcast, the principal difference being that MediaFLO USA does not market directly to the customer and doesn’t have the billing relationship with the customer. So we wholesale the service to Verizon and AT&T and they retail it.                

So you aggregate the programming. You put the programming together and then pump it out to the individual markets. How many markets are you in today?        

Yes that’s correct. We’re in, I think, officially about 40 markets or so.

Where are you in terms of subscribers today?

We don’t announce subscriber numbers yet. If MediaFLO USA were to announce subscriber numbers, we’d basically be disclosing what Verizon would consider proprietary information.

You say you own channel 55 nationwide. Do you have a transmitter humming in every TV market in America right now?      

Not yet, because it was our obligation to clear markets where we were encumbered in advance of the analog switch-off date. There were some markets that didn’t need to be cleared, many markets that did, and some markets that still do. So that’s an ongoing process.

And there’s a certain amount of time that’s required once you clear the market to get the transmitters up and get all the various permits. Only then can we make the market live.   

I understand: it’s a process. But, at the end of the day, do you expect to have a transmitter on the air in all 210 TV markets around the country?

Yes. Pretty much. I mean we’re trying to closely replicate the cellular network coverage of both Verizon and AT&T.

Where is the network operating center?

San Diego.

And after you assemble the programming there, how do you get it out to the transmitters?

In most cases via satellite. It really depends what’s the most economical means of transmission, but it’s typically satellite.

Who decides what these channels look like?

When you say “look like,” you mean the channel lineup and such? That’s really between us and the content providers. It’s a commercial negotiation. Mostly it’s what the content providers want to give you.

What’s the capacity of the MediaFLO platform?

The system is capable of 6 Mhz or up to 20 linear channels, and we can do a whole range of other services. We can do audio-only linear channels and we have a technique called clip casting. The best way to think about it is as a kind of  push video on demand. You’re essentially sending files over the MediaFLO to the phone and they’re stored on the phone and played back whenever the customer wants.

You have some very prominent programmers—NBC, Fox, CBS. So I have to ask: Why isn’t ABC playing?

All of these are commercial agreements and some agreements just take longer than others. We would love to have ABC. I’m sure they’d love to be a need for the USA. It’s just a matter of getting the terms right.

Have there been any talks with the TV station groups about incorporating local content into the MediaFlo service?

From a technology perspective, one of the things that makes us unique is that we can support both local and national programming in the same multiplex.

What it would boil down to is, it’s a commercial arrangement. What would the nature of our relationship be with the broadcasters and how do you structure that relationship? So, I don’t think we’ve really dug into that part of it at this point.

But it’s a possibility?

Yes, it’s a possibility. I mean the technology is capable of it. It’s really a question of the business arrangement between Media Flow USA and the broadcasters.

And there would be copyright issues to work through?

There are copyright issues, right. The content rights are different. One of the things that some of the broadcasters have been saying is their over-the-air rights extend to mobile broadcasting as well. Obviously I’m not a lawyer so I can’t make any sort of legal judgment on that, but it just doesn’t seem clear to a lot of people whether that’s actually true or not.

Why is MediaFlo involved in the ATSC standards process, which is supposed to be limited to in-band DTV mobile solutions?

It’s actually Qualcomm, MediaFlo’s parent company, that came in. We created the MediaFlo technology and we think it provides a number of significant advantages over competing technologies, but Qualcomm’s two big businesses are technology licensing and semiconductors.

We have a chip, which we call the MBP, the mobile broadcast platform. That’s a single chip solution that has incorporated MediaFlo, DVB-H [for Europe] and the Japanese standard, ISDBT.

That’s a receiver chip.

That’s right and the chip group is actively considering incorporating additional technologies on that. So the submission to ATSC was with that in mind.

We want to get a better understanding of what’s going on in the U.S. and it’s not uncharacteristic as I’ve pointed out. I mean we’ve done it with DVB-H and we’ve done it with Japanese ISDBT. So if and when this standard comes to be in the U.S., we’ll support that too at the chip level.

So you’re interested in supporting the broadcasters’ in-band service.

That’s right, or at least evaluate supporting it on the chip side.

Do you see yourself as competitive with the in-band system?

Not necessarily.

There are two points. First, there are free-air platforms and there are pay TV platforms and they coexist, sometimes unhappily, but they coexist.

Our view of mobile TV is pay television and this initiative by the broadcasters is free-air television.

Second, from a technology perspective, MediaFlo is a lot different in that we’re not an in-band solution. The Japanese have an in-band mobile TV standard called ISDB-T 1seg. That was a big industrial government initiative in Japan. The government basically funded the build out of the ISDB-T 1seg network so it’s free-to-air mobile television.

It’s been popular. There have been about eight million handsets sold in Japan with this capability within two years or something like that. So the take-up rate has been good.

Now, of course, you don’t know about viewership or anything like that because it’s not a subscription based service. You just know how many receivers have been sold. But I mean, clearly, there’s interest in this and this kind of thing would be popular.

The broadcasters are not necessarily talking about a free service. David Smith of Sinclair has talked about making it a pay service. As a matter a fact, he said he would lease out the mobile capability to third parties.

That’s different because then they’re not talking about implementing an in-band service and then saying, “Look, if you have the right receiver you can get it, right.”

So what he’s saying there is, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that he’s got an asset—spectrum—and if somebody wants additional spectrum in the market, he’s open to a commercial arrangement whereby they could use that spectrum to deploy a commercial service that could be a pay service.

That’s true, but I also think he could offer a pay service himself. I don’t think the broadcasters have ruled anything out.

Well, the content rights would be different for free-to-air broadcast versus pay, so they’ll have to go through that. Then, of course, encryption is not for free. They’ll have to contend with that. The other thing is, is Smith planning on sort of becoming a mini or a local pay TV operator?

What he has talked about in turning the marketing and bill collecting over to the phone companies like you have.

Verizon, AT&T and all these other guys are national businesses. They’re all about scale. So, the last thing that they would want—obviously I don’t speak for them, but if I were to sit in their shoes for a second—is a hundred different services across the U.S. They want to try to do it in as much of a uniform fashion as possible.

Right now, the standard hasn’t been determined yet and so there isn’t any way of making chips for it and then there may be some legal issues with broadcasters on whether the content rights extend or not.

Another problem is there’s no incentive for the wireless operators to actually put this in the handset because there’s no revenue for them or the revenue isn’t interesting enough

In Japan and Korea, the wireless operators are subsidizing a more expensive handset without getting anything in return or something very little in return.