New Media Exploration: MediaFLO System Overview

For my new media exploration blog entry I thought that the MediaFLO system would be a good choice since it combines existing technology with a lot of new technology.

So what makes this new design?

Well, it combines:

• Wireless technology (satellite)
  
• Broadband technology (3G cellular)
  
• Internet TV (each device is a network "node")
  
• Real time (stocks) and non-real time (music, pictures) content
• User interactivity for channel selection
  

It combines a "traditional" wireless technology, satellite, with wireless broadband cellular coverage to get real and non-real time content (Internet TV and other services) to mobile devices based on the user's subscription.



Here's how it works. The user indicates through their FLO device what kind of content they're interested in. Depending on the content type it will travel to the National Operations Center via satellite or the Internet. From there it gets routed to FLO transmitters that process the content for transmission. From there it's sent to send to the FLO device. Pretty cool, huh?

However, there's another cool thing about the FLO device's insides. Its cellular technology is kind of dual usage. One side, for the multimedia content, uses the Forward Link Only (or FLO) for content going to the mobile device. It uses the reverse link (from the mobile device) for subscription information, billing, etc.

Its other side allows MediaFLO phones to be used for voice calls (remember what those are?). So you have two (at least) devices in one.

BTW, it's not the future, it's now. Verizon and ATT have alrady commercially deployed MediaFLO.