Hasta La Gadget!

Sometimes even a Superbowl ad can’t save a product from death. Qualcomm is killing its mobile TV service called Flo TV that promised to bring popular TV channels and shows to handheld devices such as smartphones and in-car entertainment systems. It will also suspend sales of the dedicated gadgets that ran Flo TV.

“We are suspending our direct to consumer sales of new devices,” says Qualcomm in a statement. “We anticipate we will maintain the network so that current direct to consumer subscribers will continue to receive FLO programming into Spring 2011.”

Flo TV made its big debut on Super Bowl Sunday this year when about 116 million viewers watched a commercial for the service. Yet it struggled to catch on with consumers. The service faced competition from rivals such as MobiTV and Sling Media and a group called theOpen Mobile Video Coalition that is trying to bring free TV content to mobile devices.

As smartphones became more popular and consumers took to streaming their favorite shows from their laptop to the TV, companies bet the next big thing would be anywhere, anytime TV. That means fans could watch Monday night football games the next day on their way to work or catch up on an episode of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show while waiting at the DMV.

But the idea ran into a few glitches. Americans have never really taken to mobile TV with gusto. Analysts estimate just about one percent of mobile users in the U.S. watch mobile TV.

Qualcomm tried to change consumer habits by offering Flo–which stands for Forward Link Only–both on cellphones through carriers and as independent monthly service that would be available through dedicated devices.

Flo, they hoped, would triumph because of its technology. The service takes standard video signals and re-formats them for the mobile platform. Flo’s network operations center transcodes and compresses broadcast content into a single package that is sent to transmitters using satellite, microwave or optical fiber. The transmitters then send it to receiving devices over the 700-MHz spectrum.

And because it’s a push technology with one-way data transmission, from the tower to the device, it doesn’t overload the network. Video through Flo TV is relatively smooth and doesn’t stutter.

But consumers balked at the price of the service. A personal TV that runs Flo costs $250 and includes just six month of service. Users have to pay a monthly fee to keep it going. Subscription fees for Flo TV on cellphones from carriers such as AT&T ranged from $10 to $20 a month.

Despite waning consumer demand for Flo TV, Qualcomm found “strong interest” from carriers in using Flo’s network or spectrum.

“We are seeing strong interest in using the FLO TV network or spectrum to capitalize on the growing imbalance between mobile data supply and demand, the growth of tablets, and consumer demand for high quality video and print content, and a richer user experience,” says Qualcomm.

Photo: Flo TV

The new Apple TV could be Steve Jobs’ best sleight-of-hand trick yet.

During his modest introduction of the device, Jobs called the Apple TV “one more hobby.” But a closer look at the code and the hardware powering the Apple TV reveals that there’s a lot more going on under the hood than the CEO shared.

Interestingly, Jobs didn’t mention that Apple TV runs iOS, the same operating system running on its flagship product, the iPhone, and some other big hits — the iPod Touch and iPad. And there’s more, too: The Apple TV’s software may already be jailbroken, and some hidden software should eventually allow you to share the Apple TV’s media with other iOS devices.

These secret ingredients could be the recipe Apple needs to shake up the television industry. For years, Apple executives have labeled the set-top box a “hobby” product because of its mild success compared to blockbuster sellers like the iPhone and iPod. Now that Apple TV has been revamped into a streaming rental service with an arsenal of stealth features, maybe Apple has a chance to change the TV business — if not today, perhaps later.

“The most important hint of Apple’s real ambitions in the living room come from AirPlay, which puts iPhones and iPads in the driver’s seat and makes the TV just an output device for the Apple ecosystem,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, in a recent e-mail statement. “Expect Apple to gradually push more and more in that direction, but as of this moment in 2010, Apple has not yet made a significant play for control of the TV.”

Here, we round up the juicy tidbits we’ve heard about Apple’s mysterious new set-top box.

iOS and third-party app support

There’s more than enough evidence proving that the Apple TV runs iOS. Dispelling any doubts, Apple recently posted a build of iOS 4.1 specifically for the Apple TV.

This piece of information about iOS is important because of a new feature called AirPlay, which streams media from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to the Apple TV. When Jobs demonstrated AirPlay, he only showed the feature working with an iPad’s built-in video player, photo app and music library. Now that we know Apple TV runs iOS, it’s likely that third-party apps such as MLB at Bat or ABC Player will be able stream media to the set-top box, too.

DaringFireball blogger John Gruber confirmed that an AirPlay button is showing up in the MLB at Bat app, and he adds that apps using the built-in media controller will be able to integrate AirPlay.

Long story short, you’ll be able to wirelessly stream media from some third-party apps straight to your Apple TV with an AirPlay button. AirPlay is shaping up to be Apple’s secret weapon to reshape home entertainment.

In addition to AirPlay, the fact that Apple TV is running iOS means that — in principle, at least — it may someday be able to run applications from the iTunes App Store. For now, that capability is not included in Apple TV, but the underlying operating system certainly supports it, so Apple might open a TV App Store in a future software update.

Jailbreaking hacks

Third-party app support will probably be limited for the Apple TV, but that’s where the jailbreakers come in. In the same way that we’re able to override restrictions on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with a jailbreak, we should be able to run unauthorized apps on the Apple TV — something Jobs would never advertise, of course.

In fact, hackers already have a head start, because a tool called Shatter, which was used to jailbreak the newest iPod Touch, already works with the Apple TV, according to the iPhone Dev Team. That means we should be expecting hackers to code some unauthorized apps soon to unlock additional capabilities such as video conferencing via your Apple TV.

On top of that, existing hacks for the old Apple TV should work, too. Dev Team member Will Strafach explained that “the new AppleTV OS seems to be a mashup of the old AppleTV OS and iOS,” meaning “frappliances,” plug-ins that add functionality to the old Apple TV, should work as well.

‘Lowtide’ app

The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Erica Sadun, a popular iOS programmer, took a close look at the Apple TV’s software and discovered that it runs an application called Lowtide — the software containing the set-top box’s media interface.

Sadun dug deeper and found lines of code that suggest that Lowtide might eventually be extended to other iOS devices. In other words, you should be able to share media from the Apple TV to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, whereas originally we thought we’d only be able to do the converse with AirPlay. This functionality would be comparable to a Slingbox or an EyeTV.

Lowtide isn’t readily available for Apple’s iOS mobile devices yet, but iOS developer Dustin Howett has already managed to load Lowtide on an iPod touch running iOS 4.1, demonstrated in the video above. He recommended against doing it yourself, though, unless you’re ready to reformat your iPhone on a regular basis just to turn it back into a phone.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

Amazon continues to expand its reading and media software to whole new classes of devices, from new tablets to PC web browsers. It’s just not immediately clear just how far the retail giant is going to go.

We’ll take these news items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?

   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

See Also:

• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Independent App Stores Take On Google's Android Market
• Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store
• Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won't Support Android Market

Either there’s trouble at the Apple TV factory, or Apple’s “hobby” is selling so fast that it just got upgraded to a full-time job.

The new video-streaming set-top box was all set to ship in September, and Apple had already started charging credit cards of those who had pre-ordered. Now, if you head over to the Apple Store page for the Apple TV, you’ll see it will ship in two to three weeks. Apple is notorious for pushing right up to the last minute of its own deadlines, two to three weeks is as far away as the middle of October.

Another sign that all is not well come in the form of an e-mail forwarded to Apple Insider, sent to a customer informing him of a refund:

Our records indicate that when you placed your order you paid for upgraded shipping. Due to a delay, we may have not been able to meet our delivery commitment.

So, if you want an Apple TV, you’re going to have to wait, that’s certain. What’s not so sure is why they will be so late. Could it really be that, like the iPhone 4 and the iPad, Apple has simply been surprised by a huge demand? The Apple TV hasn’t seen the hype of those iDevices, so who would be buying them?

For the answer, take a look at the Airport Express. It’s a Wi-Fi–enabled receiver that lets you send music from iTunes to a remote stereo. It costs $99, the same as the Apple TV, which does this and lots more. If you want the fancy network-extending and router abilities of the Airport Express, the Apple TV isn’t for you. But if anyone was thinking of buying it just for AirPlay, then the Apple TV is an obvious upgrade.

Apple issuing refunds for Apple TV rush orders, citing delay [AppleInsider]

See Also:

• Hands-On With New $100 Apple TV
• Rumor: New $100 Apple TV Takes Aim at the Cloud
• Logitech Google TV Box Embarrasses Apple TV

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Competition is always good and the battle among streaming media players for the consumers’ living room is resulting in some new products and attractive prices.

Roku has announced three new media players that include HD streaming support of up to 1080p and improved connectivity to home entertainment systems.

The three Roku models will be the $60 Roku HD with support for 720p , the $80 Roku XD that includes wireless and 1080p HD, and the $100 Roku XDS that adds dual-band wireless technology.

“Customers can now buy an HD-capable Roku player with wireless for 40 percent less than the price of our original $100 Roku HD player,” says Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku in a statement. “Or, think of it this way: for around the price of two Blu-ray Discs, a Roku player brings you access to limitless instant streaming entertainment choices available.”

Roku’s latest line-up is a response to not just the recently launched $100 Apple TV, but also newer products that are competing for consumer attention.

As more web users turn to web video–watching Hulu, Netflix streaming movies, and episodes of their favorite TV show–companies are trying to find a way to make it easier to pipe that content from the PC to the flat screen TV. Earlier this month, a company called VeeBeam announced a $100 streaming media player that would connect your PC to the TV. Google TV, Google’s streaming media box that aggregates cable TV programming and web video, is expected to launch next month. Even Intel has started integrating streaming media software into some of its chips and laptops.

Roku’s new players will continue to offer shows from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand. It will also include sports from the MLB.TV site, music from Pandora, and photo and video sharing from Flickr and Facebook.

There are some new features. The $60 Roku HD will stream video at up to 720p and has built-in wireless and ethernet for broadband connectivity. The device is also smaller and sleeker. It is about 1 inch tall and less than 5 inches wide. It will come with composite A/V cables and an HDMI port.

The Roku XD and XDS versions will have 1080p HD support and include a feature called ‘Instant Replay’ that lets the viewer instantly skip back in 10 second increments without having to wait for a rebuffering delay.

See Also:

• Veebeam Uses Wireless USB to Stream Media From PC to TV
• Intel Touts ‘WiDi’ for Connecting PCs, TVs
• Google Introduces Google TV, New Android OS
• Google TV Likely to Launch at Best Buy on October 17
• 7 Ways to Watch Web Video Without Google TV

Photo: Roku