sporting events,” and he also noted that cable TV operators have shown high interest in Flo TV’s business.
I later got more insight in an interview with Stone, who said, “the good news and the bad news about Flo TV” is that Qualcomm launched the service three years ago, which was long before anyone else. The good news, Stone explained, is that Flo TV remains the only mobile TV broadcaster in the United States, so Qualcomm is not in a competitive situation comparable to Sirius and XM, the rival satellite-based digital radio service providers that eventually combined in mid-2008. The bad news, Stone added, is that Qualcomm launched Flo TV “without a lot of key building blocks” so that Flo TV’s broadcasts only reached about half the country until existing additional TV licenses became available and digital broadcasting equipment could be used.
The mobile devices themselves have proved to be another barrier, Stone said. “What we found was that if we bet right on devices, we got subscribers—and if we bet wrong, we didn’t.”
The same thing could be said in general about Qualcomm’s bet on Flo TV. Company executives are trying to figure out what works—and what doesn’t—at a time of rapid convergence among broadcasting, mobile, and Web-based technologies.
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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.
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