When Sky wanted to compare two competing technologies (DVB-H and MediaFLO^TM), Arqiva's experience and neutrality made us the ideal partner to provide the broadcast technology system integration and support.

Using Arqiva's knowledge of spectrum occupancy, two Arqiva sites around Cambridge were identified as fitting the tight frequency constraints required for this technology comparison.  Circuits carrying the MediaFLO^TM services were provisioned and a new transmitter cabin installed at one of the sites, all within two months, allowing a rapid, yet thorough, comparison of the technologies to be made, satisfying our customer's needs, and adding to Arqiva's unrivalled knowledge and experience of Mobile TV Networks.

More about FLO technology

FLO technology is an air-interface technology designed to increase capacity and coverage, and reduce cost for multimedia content delivery to mobile handsets. The technology is specifically designed for mobile reception.

Specific features of the FLO technology in a UHF 8MHz RF channel include:

• support for transmitting up to 30+ streaming channels of QVGA-quality (320x240 pixels) video at up to 25 frames per second
• 10 stereo audio channels (HE AAC+ parametric stereo)
• up to 800 minutes of distributed Clipcast^TM content per day (short-format video clips)
• an average channel switching time of less than two seconds.

The MediaFLO^TM system is an end-to-end solution that enables broadcasting of high-quality video and audio streams, Clipcast media and IP datacasting to mobile handsets. It is comprised of the MediaFLO^TM Media Distribution System (MDS) and FLO broadcast technology. It is also a manageable, scalable, subscription-based distribution system and an efficient over-the-air network solution that provides mobile operators or TV platform operators an efficient way to deliver high-quality audio and video content.