New MediaFLO chief outlines the future of FLO TV

Mobile TV programming is still a relatively new concept—there are only a handful of people who can list it on their resumes, and many of them already work for Qualcomm. So when Qualcomm went looking for a new head of MediaFLO USA, it was only natural it gravitated toward Bill Stone, the former president of Amp'd Mobile.

Amp'd didn't last too long and certainly didn't grow very big before it succumbed to bankruptcy, but in its little more than a year of existence, it pulled off what nobody in the mobile industry could seem to manage: it built a completely unique mobile TV and video platform on a base of original content that proved to be not only edgy but quite popular. It signed deals to broadcast live sporting events such as Ultimate Fighting Championship matches and Motocross directly to its subscribers' phones. It produced in-house and contracted with outside studios to create original short-form content for the mobile phone, the most famous of which -- Lil' Bush, a parody of the former president -- was picked up by TV network Comedy Central.

Earlier this month, Stone took over as President of MediaFLO after a short stint as CEO of Handango, and while he's bringing his experience from Amp'd to the table, he said MediaFLO is a completely different animal from his former tiny MVNO. It's not his intention to remake FLO TV in the image of Amp'd—far from it. FLO already has most of the key components in place to be highly successful: technology, partnerships and business models. What it needs, Stone said, are more subscribers.

"I wouldn't say there is anything radical planned," Stone said. "My view is that FLO TV is the best game in town for all things broadcast television on any device that's wireless. It's just phenomenal to have a quality product like this. You've got this great product. You've got this great set of features. You've obviously got this great content. The question for me is 'How do you scale it?'"

It's only been four weeks since he's taken the job, Stone explained, so he doesn't have all of the answers yet, but a big part of his subscriber growth plans involve increasing the availability of the mobile TV service, which involves growing MediaFLO's footprint. MediaFLO's efforts to do just that have been frustrated in the last two years as incumbent broadcasters in the 700 MHz have proved difficult to budge. The result has been a rather spotty nationwide network. It covers some 120 million people, but in many markets, it has only partial coverage due to interference from nearby broadcasters, and it has had to skip over some major markets entirely, such as Boston and San Francisco.