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Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow Qualcomm's big bet on mobile TV
Qualcomm's big bet on mobile TV E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
San Diego-based Qualcomm has spent several years and millions of dollars developing and commercialising, in the US its MediaFLO mobile broadcast system. Now, with mobile TV tipped for massive growth it is working hard to get the technology adopted around the world.

Qualcomm is a company that has made a couple of radical shifts in focus in its 20 year history. Founded in 1985, it started out providing contract research and development services, with limited product manufacturing, for the wireless telecommunications market.

One of its first goals was to develop a commercial product. The result was OmniTRACS, a satellite based communications system for the transportation industry. OmniTRACS is today, according to Qualcomm, the largest satellite-based commercial mobile system for that industry.

Then a couple of years later it embarked on a task that many thought impossible. The US had just standardised a digital cellular technology (D-AMPS) as the next evolution from the widely deployed analogue system AMPS. Qualcomm came up with CDMA which it claimed was superior, and it set about getting it accepted as a standard. Not only did it succeed, CDMA has proved far more enduring than the D-AMPS standard which is pretty much obsolete (New Zealand has just announced plans to shut down its D-AMPS network).

Omar Javaid, VP of business development for Qualcomm MediaFLO Technologies likes to call these two phases of the company's evolution 'Qualcomm 1.0' and 'Qualcomm 2.0. He is now charged with making a success of Qualcomm 3.0: another radical shift into the world of broadcast technologies and, perhaps even more challenging, the broadcast business.

MediaFLO is a complete technology platform for broadcasting multiple video (as well as audio and data) channels to handheld devices; initially, but not necessarily mobile phones.

This time the competitive environment into which Qualcomm has thrown itself is far more complex, and challenging, than trying to get acceptance for a cellular standard. There are multiple competing technologies; delivery technologies are inextricably tied up with digital rights management and issues of dealing with content owners; and in most countries around the world, spectrum must be made available for whatever technology is chosen.

 
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Cornered! is a blog on all things tele-communication from the perspective of one who has observed, analysed commented and reported on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition).
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