MediaFLO: Mobile TV sucks now, but it's nothing £500m won't fix

Mobile TV isn't on-demand, like iPlayer -- it's streaming TV that's broadcast live, with pause and rewind like on a PVR. That makes it best for big-ticket and live programmes -- the finale of the Apprentice, for example, if you're into watching graduates of former polytechnics humiliate themselves for a minor technology exec with an inflated ego. Programmes are sucked in to the broadcast centre in Qualcomm City, outside San Diego, via a dedicated satellite, then digitised and fired out automagically in less than five seconds to transmitters that broadcast in the UHF spectrum. Thanks to the US' recent digital switchover, there's a fair slice of that air to spare, and finally the whole switchover malarkey makes sense. Qualcomm already owns a huge chunk of the UK spectrum, the 40MHz bit of the L band. God only knows what they're planning for it, and their lips are sealed. Judging by the Dalek doctor we saw, it'll be used be our robot overlords to plan our inevitable destruction. But it looks unlikely that Qualcomm will be anxious to shell out the coin in the UK that it did to become a nationwide broadcaster in the US. Instead, it's looking for a partner that's already got a network of antennae covering our green and pleasant land. It did a trial with BSkyB in Cambridge and Manchester in 2006, but there's been no news since then, leaving us wondering if anyone's as ambitious as Qualcomm when it comes to putting TV in our pockets.