Inside MediaFLO’s Operations Center—And the Race to Deploy Over-the-Air Mobile TV Service

The digital broadcast center for Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile TV service is a hushed, dimly lit room in San Diego that is dominated by 24 flat-screen, rear-projection screens mounted along one wall. The engineers in the room face these ever-changing displays at work stations equipped with even more flat-panel screens, so the darkness is illuminated by a mosaic of streaming video images and computer-generated data.

I recently took a tour of this sophisticated, high-tech facility to get a feel for what it takes to broadcast TV programs to mobile devices nationwide. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) began developing the underlying technology for this ambitious business more than seven years ago. In 2007, when Qualcomm announced it was ready to begin its mobile TV service, the company said it had spent $800 million over the previous five years.
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Today MediaFLO is transmitting full-length TV programs and movies, along with occasional live broadcasts of news and sports to wireless handheld devices in 65 markets throughout the United States. As impressive as the technology is, though, MediaFLO has yet to gain wide acceptance, and Qualcomm still faces significant risks from rivals who hope to gain ground on the San Diego telecom giant.

Qualcomm had planned to significantly expand its MediaFLO service to an additional 40 U.S. markets immediately after Feb. 17. That was when TV stations across the country had been expected to shut down their analog broadcasts on UHF Channel 55 in a long-planned conversion to digital technology. But Qualcomm’s plans for MediaFLO, which uses the same spectrum as Channel 55, were set back after the government postponed the nationwide digital TV conversion date until June 12.

The extent of Qualcomm’s efforts to develop the technology can be seen on the screens of the company’s network operations center. Some displays continuously monitor

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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.