Mobile video service Flo TV not drawing audience

Wall Street Journal
At the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference this week (#d8, if you’re following it on Twitter), Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs told attendees that its Flo TV is not getting the hoped-for audience. The service is designed to deliver television programming to phones, portable televisions and cars, and currently distributes content from a number of broadcast and cable outlets, including CNN.

“There are people who love it, but the numbers are not nearly what we expected,” Jacobs said. The service may evolve to “a more general system for delivering data to mobile devices that isn’t limited to video.” 

A number of factors explain the small audience. Flo TV is not cheap ($200 a year for portable TV); the different services must be purchased separately (you buy the mobile package from your provider); and the coverage isn’t nationwide.

Whether the limited interest in Flo TV says anything about the interest in mobile television more generally is unclear. Earlier this spring at NAB, a consortium of broadcasters announced a joint venture to deliver content. And several recent studies predict that traffic for mobile video is going to grow enormously in the next four years, enough to strain the cellular networks.

Stay tuned for what this means for your mobile video content. In spite of the news about Flo TV, I suspect making your video available on mobile will be increasingly important.

>Online Video Will Push Internet Traffic to Quadruple by 2014 (Mashable)