What Would the British Tabloids Say? Qualcomm Unveils Deal With Victoria’s Secret

Did San Diego’s Qualcomm score a huge coup for its MediaFlo mobile television service yesterday by arranging broadcast rights to the 2008 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on Dec. 3?

That was the take at GigaOm, which reported all MediaFlo subscribers will be able to watch the broadcast on their portable wireless devices when it is simultaneously broadcast on CBS TV from the Fountainbleau Miami Beach Resort. Online coverage of Qualcomm’s announcement elsewhere was surprisingly restrained—perhaps even uplifting. What would the British tabloids say?

GigaOm says it’s a big deal because the Victoria’s Secret lingerie show pulled in a television audience of 6.5 million last year, equivalent to the number of people who are watching any type of mobile TV.

But the Silicon Valley Insider notes that you can’t watch Marisa Miller and other supermodels strutting on just any type of mobile TV. You must own a special phone equipped with MediaFlo technology to watch the show. So far it is only available on Verizon’s VCast video service and AT&T’s MobileTV service, which both charge a subscription fee, and only in 58 major metropolitan areas.

Silicon Valley Insider also noted that only about 1 percent of U.S. wireless subscribers watch any mobile TV.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.