Most of the young college graduates these days have little to no recollection of broadcast television much less UHF.  Yet in the era of YouTube and Hulu where users routinely stream on-demand video over the wired Internet, there’s still a place for wireless broadcast television.  At the CTIA convention in San Diego, Qualcomm wants to prove that old is new again with a new dedicated MediaFLO player for their mobile TV subscription service which broadcasts up to 20 small screen channels on UHF channel 55.

While the service may seem counterintuitive to those accustomed to on-demand video, there are two main reasons why the broadcast model makes sense.  For one thing, there will always be a need for live broadcasts for things like major news events and sports.  The second major reason is that it is extremely inefficient to retransmit the exact same material to each individual user with a technology called unicasting.  While this works on wired networks where capacity isn’t as constrained and distributed caching servers can be used to slash bandwidth usage in the core of the Internet, unicast video simply does not scale on wireless network.

Just 20 people unicasting a single 250 Kbps video stream would consume every bit of capacity on a wireless base station when the same bandwidth can support hundreds of simultaneous mobile phone users and hundreds of mobile web browsers.  Yet using UHF broadcasting technology, the same spectrum can potentially support a million users watching 20 different channels on the same base station.  This is why wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T have turned to MediaFLO technology which uses a separate channel and radio to pull in up to 20 MediaFLO channels over UHF instead of using up valuable capacity on their 3G networks.

The only thing that seems to stand in the way of large scale deployment has been the dearth of MediaFLO phones and the high month service fee.  Qualcomm hopes to change things with a dedicated personal MediaFLO TV device for $250 and a lower subscription fee of less than $9 per month with three year contract.  While that still seems a little expensive for the average user, the price is headed in the right direction.