British Sky Broadcasting Limited, also known as BSkyB, on Tuesday said it has signed a non-binding letter of intent to conduct technical trials of Qualcomm (News - Alert)’s MediaFLO mobile TV technology in the United Kingdom.

 

The trial – which is expected to begin during the summer of 2006 and will feature 10 channels of content from the U.K.’s leading pay-TV provider on just a small number of non-commercial devices – represents more of a coup for the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) innovator, which hinted at a potential deal last week when it hosted analysts in New York at an investors’ conference.

 

That’s because BSkyB has offered mobile TV services, dubbed “Sky Mobile TV,” since the end of 2005 through a partnership with Vodafone UK. The decision to trial MediaFLO also comes as competitor, O2, announced limited trials of a similar TV service based on the competing DVB-H multicasting technology – a European standard that has also gained some traction in the U.S. through operators like Crown Castle’s Modeo unit.

 

The BSkyB technical trial is expected to be the first such trial in Europe of the FLO air-interface technology that is designed to increase capacity and coverage, and reduce cost for multimedia content delivery to mobile handsets. Qualcomm’s MediaFLO unit is also working with Vodafone’s U.S. wireless partner, Verizon (News - Alert), to deploy wireless mobile TV services in the United States through Verizon Wireless. In addition to this technical trial, Qualcomm has formed a joint venture with KDDI to explore MediaFLO deployment in Japan.

 

“BSkyB is committed to offering customers flexible ways to enjoy our services,” said Stephen Nuttall, BSkyB's group director of business development. “We have led the way in the delivery of mobile TV over existing platforms and we look forward to working with Qualcomm in this technical trial to evaluate the potential of MediaFLO.”

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

Mobile Telephony