Submitted by johnh on November 16, 2005 - 11:33.
Well, the ROKR "iPod phone" from Motorola was a disaster for them in the US. So it's a rare thing when a major company (and a telco, at that) steps back and looks at what it did wrong. Rarer still when they hit the correct answer spot on.
Cingular is to add broadcast radio to its phone network.
Sadly, it's Music Choice. Fumbled three feet from the touchline, as I believe local parlance would have it. But hey, pretty close for a first attempt.
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Notwithstanding the radically different reasons, the thing that the US has in common with Ireland in this regard is that it's impossible to start a national radio station (which would get an audience).
3G phone networks are technically capable of delivering one. In the UK at least, each handset has an IP address which is internal to its phone network, and that network is enabled for IP Broadcast and/or Multicast. Right now even Cingular appears to be looking at this from a 'pay-per-listen' perspective, charging subscribers for the extra 'service' of delivering boring radio without presenters.
If a network looked on radio as a transmission resource on which it could run a commercial service or two, it could deliver an advertising audience in the millions - and because of the nature of the network, do so without screwing up other uses.
Plus - and here's the real killer - it could swap out the 30-second ad slots based on the age, gender and/or location of the listener by jumping from the network broadcast to a short MP4 playlist the phone's been trickle-downloading to a temporary directory during the 5 minutes leading up to the ad break. The future of radio isn't swapping tunes, it's swapping ads. That sounds counter-intuitive but people listen to radio for the presenters more than they do for the music. No 'custom playlist' channel will ever be as good at delivering a custom playlist as my own record collection, so why bother?
[If anybody from a suitably-equipped phone network sees this and would like me to show them how to achieve that particular Nirvana, by the way, drop john @ this domain a line.]
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Mostly of course I'm digging this news today because I have 'prestige' bets with about two dozen DAB fanboys (read: radio industry people who don't understand radio audiences) which date back seven or eight years now. I stand by my prediction that internet radio will get into the car at an affordable price point before DAB takes hold.
And for those I've not bored rigid with this before, here's the canned version of why, and what that means for the radio industry:
- Digital Radio (in the form of Eureka247) is not deployed worldwide, while internet streaming audio formats are
- A Europe-only standard:
- Will not under any circumstances ever get to tens millions of units sold per year for under US $100 before the mobile phone industry, and
- Anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is an idiot
- When one has the choice of 9,000 stations instead of a couple of dozen robot-stations,
- Des O'Connor FM (all Des, all the time) will have a larger audience than London's Capital FM...
- ..because DesFM will have all the Des fans on the planet...
- ...and Capital will have 1/2000th of the chart hits radio audience at most.
- This scares the crap out of commercial radio broadcasters, and rightly so. So they simply choose to ignore the possibility, whereas it's actually more of a certainty and whoever realises it first will eat the proverbial lunch of everyone else.
Bring it on.