ITU: FLO makes waves in Europe, Asia
07 December 2006
On Wednesday, Japan's Softbank group took the membership of mobile TV organisation, the FLO Forum, past the 70 member milestone. Softbank, which operates Japan's smallest mobile network, said it was committed to exploring FLO-based mobile TV services through the MediaFLO planning entity.
MediaFLO Japan was set up by FLO developer Qualcomm as a joint venture with another operator, KDDI, in 2005, to investigate the potential for the mobile TV technology.
Speaking to telecoms.com at the ITU 2006 conference in Hong Kong this week, MaryBeth Selby, working committee advisory chair board chair at the FLO Forum, said that the focus of the group at the moment was to change any perception that FLO is a US-centric technology.
Hinting that Qualcomm had learned a hard lesson through its protection and control of the CDMA standard, Selby said that the formation of the FLO Forum 18 months ago was a deliberate attempt to push the development of FLO out from under Qualcomm's wings. "This is not a Qualcomm only solution," said Selby.
Indeed, FLO as a technology is gaining some considerable support outside of the US, although the majority of the FLO forum members are US-based (25), 17 members of the community now come from Europe with the remainder mostly based in Asia.
Earlier this week UK broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) announced the successful completion of a joint technical trial of Qualcomm's FLO system in the UK.
The technical trial, conducted over two months in Cambridge, featured 11 channels from the BSkyB content menu delivered to non-commercial devices from Qualcomm. The tests aimed to demonstrate the performance of MediaFLO in both laboratory and mixed field test environments. Factors such as total throughput, single frequency network (SFN), network acquisition, channel switching times, layered modulation and video codec performance were evaluated.
Robin Crossley, strategy adviser, technology for BSkyB said: "We're very pleased with the results of this trial of MediaFLO technology... this was a thorough test of the technology's capabilities, yielding encouraging results."
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