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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.