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“If it’s only mobile TV, we’re dissatisfied, we’re not happy with it,” Bill Stone, the Flo unit’s head, said in an interview. “There are going to be a lot of revenue streams off this service.”

Stone says the strain on mobile-phone networks caused by ballooning demand for video and data should make Flo attractive to service providers and phone makers. Flo works on a system using airwaves that Qualcomm bought in federal auctions. Flo- enabled devices have separate radios and chips that enable them to receive the service from Qualcomm’s transmitters. “One person streaming a video takes up as much bandwidth as 100 cell phone calls,” said Stone. “Networks break down and can’t handle it. For me, whether I have one or 1 million users, it doesn’t matter.”

Distributing magazines with high-resolution pictures is another area where Flo can send content to mobile devices more effectively than wireless-service providers, Stone said. His network would broadcast the data to everyone at once, with only handsets that have subscriptions enabled to access the files.

MobiTV now faces a dilemma: CMO Ray DeRenzo explained the company, which has a number of popular mobile TV streaming applications, needs permission from its partners to sell the same 35 channels that it offers on cellphones today on tablets, too. But currently, the content owners are demanding a different rate structure for the tablet because it’s not clear whether it is a mobile device. MobiTV today charges $10 a month on a cellphone but that could soar to $30 a month on a tablet. “As a distributor, we have to license content, and the value of the content is set by the rights’ holders and content producers. [The tablet is] being priced as a home TV equivalent,” he said. “We have to make sure we can make a product that’s compelling to end users in terms of programming and price.” At the higher rate structure, he doesn’t believe there’s a market.

You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it’s really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely, by giving us “better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.”