Olympics Review: NBC Olympics 2Go On AT&T’s MediaFLO Lineup
More often than not, video on mobile phones is a lackluster experience. MediaFLO has been the most obvious exception to that rule in the United States since its service launched in March 2007. Although its nationwide rollout has been slow and customers aren’t paying $15 a month for the broadcast-like TV service in droves, one thing’s for sure: MediaFLO’s got the best mobile video around. No buffering, pixilated mess here. As the Olympics approached, AT&T (NYSE: T) used its position as an Olympics sponsor and the official telecommunications provider to the U.S. team to squeeze out an exclusive channel from NBC on its MediaFLO lineup. Throughout the games, AT&T had sole rights for live competition footage on the MediaFLO platform.
—Features: Other than the unmatched video quality, the features are pretty basic. It’s a streaming feed of video, much like you get at home on TV. Sometimes the programming matched up closely with what NBC was airing on television, but not often. The channel, like others on the platform, routinely used optimized graphics to display text and statistics legibly on the small screen.
—Passive experience: Mobile is a pro-active environment and it’s on this point where MediaFLO goes into a tailspin. Mobile is supposed to be ahead of the curve or at least in line with the norm, and while MediaFLO is ahead on video quality, its content library is lagging. On-demand content would be an outstanding addition to the MediaFLO system. The Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) subsidiary knows it and has hinted it at it for years, but doesn’t appear any closer to making that a reality. How cool it would have been to pull up some of the major athletic milestones achieved during the games in video snippets. Or what about the opening and closing ceremonies? I could watch that a few times over.
Much more after the jump...
—Conclusion: Why was the NBC Olympics 2Go channel already blacked out by early Sunday? Why not leave the channel running for another week with highlights? MediaFLO still has a major leg-up on the competition. Video services delivered by carrier networks all include an on-demand component, but what’s the point of pulling up a clip if the end result is still freeze frame after freeze frame? Short lived, special events channels like this one do a decent job at highlighting the service’s potential, but also shed more light on its limitations.
—Ads: Like the other MediaFLO channels, commercial spots are quite similar to what you’d expect to see on TV. The commercials were the same ones aired on TV with a few NBC- and MediaFLO-related promotional spots mixed in.
Staci adds: While Matt was reviewing AT&T’s MediaFlo, I spent some time with Verizon’s (NYSE: VZ) version via a Voyager. The AT&T exclusive meant Verizon mobile viewers were in yet another alternative NBC universe, one showing hours in a row of reality-show reruns when I checked at one point. The video delivery was fine; just nothing I wanted to watch. On AT&T, I tried Mobi, which was fine, but discovered I preferred VOD highlights and spent most of my Tilt viewing time with AT&T MediaNet. I also checked out the video from NBC’s WAP site and found a real difference in quality between that and the faster-to-load MediaNet video direct from the carrier. The Stromotion videos kept going to buffer hell. AT&T re-encodes for its devices while NBC relies on device recognition, which it is working to improve.
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