• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 5, 2010

Even the executives at Qualcomm's long-suffering Flo TV project have been unusually honest about the slow traction for its mobile TV system. Over the past few years, its chief executives have been quoted saying that the model for broadcasting live video streams to phones has not caught on in the U.S. as quickly as it liked. According to a report at paidcontent.org the service will end it direct-to-consumer service by the end of the year.

Technically, the D-to-C portion of Flo TV really only involves the small business it tried to cultivate in dedicated portable TV devices and in-car screens. Flo TV also operates under the Verizon and AT&T labels on their respective specialty phones, and the company is said to be negotiating with those partners about the fate of this wholesale model. The model moving forward might be simply to lease the mobile TV network and let others program it. Verizon and AT&T are responsible for most of the sign-ups for this service, but I have never heard any company suggest that this model for sending TV signals direct to a handset was making serious headway. It is getting harder to imagine that the carriers will continue to support this failed model.

Flo TV had secured a number of major brands that one would think map well against an always-on TV everywhere approach: ESPN, CNN, ABC, Discovery, Nick, MTV. As someone who had review phones from both of the major carriers that played Flo TV to its best advantage, I can tell you that it was neither the content or even the technology at fault here. In fact, as a TV service, Flo TV had a very good user experience. A highly resolved screen really can make the small display size feel irrelevant after a short while. Also the channel switching and speed of startup was better in most cases that streamed mobile video. The actual interface was not half bad either. On many handsets I tried you could navigate the program grid while still watching the current TV signal.

The problem with Flo TV was that there just weren't many use cases for a live feed beyond a breaking news story or a must-see sports event. To be sure all of us will glance at TV sets when sitting in airports or on check out lines, but that is different from whipping out the handset and dropping in to TV program already in progress on a phone. You could just as easily drop into a commercial pod as programming. And guess what, part of watching TV in the privacy of our own home is the privacy. Not everyone wants to broadcast their personal media taste to anyone in earshot.

The programmers of all mobile TV formats have struggled with this problem. Some of them like Mobile TV even crafted shorter program formats for familiar prime time shows, so the user was only dropping into 15 or 20 minute shows rather than full hour episodes.

TV in your pocket sounds like a cooler idea than it actually is in practice in one's life. In most cases, I forgot that the service was on the phone. There was little earnest attempt to weave programming alerts or other parts of the mobile phone data channel in with the TV experience. Paying $15 or a so a month for a service you might remember to use once a month to keep the kids happy in the back seat is not going to be a game changer.

Perhaps there is a lesson I here for the "TV everywhere" crowd. Yes, TV remains the killer content everyone craves -- but not necessarily in the same way all the time. Context matters. Content still has to match the possible use cases.