Oh The Challenges MediaFLO Will Face

As Qualcomm continues to sink lots of money into its MediaFLO broadcast to mobile network, people are finally beginning to ask some questions about all of the challenges the system faces. Assuming the technology actually delivers (perhaps a big if...), it's still not clear there's a decent business model in broadcast audio and video to mobile phones. As we pointed out this morning, it's popular to say that broadcast drives mobile data usage, but there isn't much evidence to support that. The big successes in mobile data (SMS, ringtones) are more about communicating with others and interactivity -- not passively receiving content. Getting people to then pay $20 or so a month for this content they're not really sure they want sounds like it's going to be a big challenge.

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