Media-FLO Info for Japan

Qualcomm quietly opened MediaFLO-info.com on 1 August as part of the companies march to launch their mobile tv broadcast services in Japan. The Japanese only version includes overview materials, links to the FloForum and Mobile Media Planning Corp., which is wholly-owned by SoftBank, along with a sign-up form for their mail magazine. No official press release announcing the new site could be found, in English or Japanese, at the time of this posting.

We did notice, via Tech-On, an interesting related comment by Tadashi Onodera, president and chairman of KDDI Corp., from his recent presentation at the Wireless Japan trade-show:

Commenting on MediaFLO multimedia distribution services for mobile phones, Onodera said, “I am often asked why KDDI focuses on MediaFLO and what’s wrong with 1seg. Why do we persist in MediaFLO? It’s because we consider it is important to develop a next-generation multimedia broadcast by ourselves.”

He explains that the technology attracts the company because, unlike 1seg, MediaFLO allows the company to take the initiative in designing everything including service contents.

WWJ has covered the on-going efforts of MediaFLO to enter the Japanese market. The story took an un-expected turn in May when the Japanese Ministry of Communications indicated that allocation of new spectrum, considered central to the launch of their services, might not go to exisiting carrier partners as expected.