FLO TV President Stone sees FLO TV expanding beyond mobile television

The president of FLO TV, Bill Stone, says the future of the service depends upon finding more uses for the service other than merely watching television on the go. In an interview with Bloomberg, Stone said about FLO TV, "If it's only mobile TV, we're dissatisfied, we're not happy with it There are going to be a lot of revenue streams off this service." Besides looking for other things to disseminate across its network, Stone wants FLO TV to be portable and easily moved from one handset to another. To that end, the company is working on an antenna-like product that allows the service to be switched from one phone to another. The executive says that his service could help carriers reduce bandwidth congestion. In the U.S., the service operates far removed from cellular frequencies at 716-722MHz. "One person streaming a video takes up as much bandwidth as 100 cell phone calls," said Stone. "Networks break down and can't handle it. For me, whether I have one or 1 million users, it doesn't matter."

Recently, at the All Things Digital conference, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said he sees the service graduating beyond mobile video in the future and showed off a new service called Mirasol that allows phones to receive text, similar to an e-reader, but with color and with video. That could be an interesting use of the FLO TV network. As for the basic television service, analyst Susan Kevorkian of  IDC estimates that Mobile T.V. viewership in the U.S. will rise to 30.3 million people by 2013, up from about 23.8 million this year. In the U.S., cellular carriers AT&T and Verizon offer some phones that use the service.

source: Bloomberg via FierceMobile