Qualcomm CEO: Mobile TV is not dead, but needs live broadcasting

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Qualcomm has not quite given up on Mobile TV and indeed the product’s future could lie in live broadcasting, according to CEO, Paul Jacobs, speaking at a technology panel in Silicon Valley Tuesday night.
Fielding a question on Mobile TV from AllThingsD reporter Kara Swisher, at the Churchill Club in San Jose, California, Jacobs covered his face in his hands in what appeared to be mock despair – but may have been real despair considering how much money Qualcomm spent on its failed MediaFlo mobile TV service which managed to pick up just a million subscribers.
Jacobs, whose firm is still deciding what to do with Flo after suspending sales recently, said too few people had liked what the service had to offer, mainly owing to limitations on content and screen size. That said, the CEO hadn’t lost all faith.

“I believe in mobile TV still. Our approach to it didn’t get enough subscribers,” he maintained, adding that with that said, live broadcasting seemed to be the right direction to push Mobile TV in.
Live sports, for instance, said Jacobs, could prove incredibly important for TV services on phones and tablets in the very near future, bandwidth permitting. “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” he went on, noting that the industry and government were working on it but that in the meanwhile the industry would “have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”
Asking consumers to turn on and tune in to watch a show at a specific time was a “total non-starter” for Flo TV, Jacobs said, advocating a more Tivo-like model for everything other than big live events.
Jacobs shared the floor with Hewlett-Packard Co’s Jon Rubinstein, the executive responsible for the company’s Palm division. The two mobile moguls also agreed that Apple’s iPhone had changed the smartphone industry completely, and had forced other phone makers to put a lot more effort into device interfaces.
Jacobs also found time to plug Qualcomm’s Mirasol low-power display technology, noting that the biggest limitation to today’s devices was the poor battery life.