Categories
dab digital radio mobile

Great Rumour – Interesting Outcome

iPhone + Jahah

iphone plus jajah by jahah @ flickr 

It appears my scepticism about the rumours of the iPod to include Digital Radio was well founded. How on earth the real announcement got extrapolated to that is quite impossible to believe, but a salutary tale none-the-less.

The actual news is that the iPhone now has WiFi access to the iTunes store. (How clever not to go bunging up the tiny datafootpath of GPRS that is the iPhone’s sole contact with the real world). I’m not that impressed. Same application, different bearer, big deal.

The interesting stuff comes in the last breaths. Apple have linked up with Starbucks. A meeting of the brands – can you imagine the ponytails, chino jeans and lattés in those meetings? Starbucks, you might be aware, is also hopping on the music bandwagon by making big its policy of playing music in its stores. (I’m sure MacDonalds have done that for years?). But here’s the big revolutionary “oh my god, how clever are Apple?!” idea.

Starbucks will tell Apple the song that’s currently playing the store… and the last ten songs played. You can download them (using the WiFi in all Starbucks) with just a couple of clicks.

Wow. Wish I’d thought of that.

(Actually – wish I’d thought of taking the idea to Apple).

Now I wonder if Apple is interested in doing the same with radio stations, or if we’re just simply not cool enough for them? (Note to self – buy new Chinos, grow ponytail, drink more latté).

Categories
dab digital radio

Crossed Wires or Groundbreaking Announcement?

iPod

my new ipod nano by baston @ flickr

My attention was drawn to this report that Apple will be announcing iPods with Digital Radio functionality this week. In summary it says that Apple will announce an iPod with “digital radio” and a “buy now” function to download and buy tracks (from iTunes) as they are being played.

I’ll admit that I’m bemused and intruiged.

This might be a re-heat of the news of a DAB Digital Radio plug-in for the iPod that kind of leaked out earlier in the year. But that’s strictly a DAB Digital Radio “sidecar” that clips to the bottom of the device. It’s a long extrapolation from that to the kind of device talked about in the report.

I still find it unlikely that Apple would add DAB Digital Radio functionality to the iPod for the size of markets that exist now. Whilst the UK, Denmark and Switzerland are doing very nicely, I can’t see how they would be sufficiently big enough markets to influence Apple’s global (or even European) strategy. Adding DAB technology still comes with a price that throws about £30 (US$60) onto the price of a unit. Would Apple add that price?

Most unlikely is that anyone has found a business model for downloading music via DAB Digital Radio capacity. If they have, I take my hats off to them. There is a model there somewhere, but tying up over the air data capacity to speculatively send a song never seems to add up to me. As far as I am aware, only UBC’s Cliq service has developed the pre-requisite technology framework to make this happen, and have been the only people talking to broadcasters about whether they want to transmit it or not.

Apparently we only have to wait until Wednesday for an answer. Then we’ll presumably get the truth. (Actually, the main reason for my scepticism is that Apple haven’t been furiously denying it for weeks, which is the most sure sign that something is true).

I still have high hopes for iRiver’s B20 device, which co-incidentally has also got some coverage this week here, here and here. It’s a great device, which is very well converged and the implementation of DAB Digital Radio is one of the best I’ve used. I’m also tremendously pleased to see the inclusion of a proper EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) and support for Slideshow visuals. It’s a bit pricey, but hopefully it will still be a big seller.

Categories
technology

Tweaking

Old Telephones by givepeasachance @ flickr.com

Old Telephones by givepeasachance @ flickr.com

You’ll maybe notice that I’ve moved to blog over to WordPress (on James’ hearty recommendation), and I’m hoping it has been seamless. I haven’t yet customised the templates. That’s the next thing to do, along with a general redesign of the code to add some cleverness stuff here and there.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time lately playing more with Voice Over IP (VoIP). I think it’s an interesting technology, and disrupting a well established business model. It’s also financially very attractive to me, having friends and relations all over the place. I now have VoIP “trunks” coming in from 7 different places, aggregated into an Asterisk PBX server.

I wish I could say it was a simple configuration, but even by cheating and downloading the rather marvellous trixbox, which is a bootable CD which completely installs a machine from scratch, it was still a major headache getting it to go. Admittedly, I’m asking for some slightly non-standard things, and balancing access to the server with network security was tricky. I had to drop back to hand editing config files, and sifting through conflicting information from various enthusiast forums, which is not an “out of the box” experience.

After a good solid number of nights work (have you noticed how this kind of messing about always ends up being “nights work”?), it’s pretty much the way I wanted it to be. I can login from the laptop wherever I happen to be in the world, and it aggregates all my calls and voicemails to one place. If I happen not to be logged on to VoIP, it will tentatively call my mobile phone but pull back from that if I don’t answer and take a voicemail which it then e-mails me. I think that’s pretty neat, and should knock the roaming bills down.

The next thing to look forward to is IBC in Amsterdam, and getting a look-see at what new technology is coming our way in 2008.

Categories
real life

Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson by Jason Slack @ flickr Tony Wilson by Jason Slack @ flickr

It’s a sad day. Tony Wilson, ‘Mr. Manchester’ as the BBC has dubbed him, has died of cancer at the age of 57.

I’m feeling a bit shell-shocked. He was a man of tremendous energy and confidence, and he led a life that regularly thumbed its nose at risk and convention.

I was living in Manchester during the Madchester era. I felt the energy that it generated, and so much of it eminated from Tony and Factory Records.

I met him a few times; about a radio licence I was applying for, and around In The City, the music conference that he brought to life. He was by turns infuriating and utterly inspirational. I wish that I’d had the chance to work with/for/against him in radio in Manchester.

When I heard he had cancer, I simply didn’t believe it would overcome him. So little has swayed his course over the years, it seemed quite reasonable to assume that he’d shrug this off to. But the end seems to have been very swift.

Many people have given their recollections of Tony, and I was pleased to see Manchester City Council acknowledging the immense role he played in the regeneration of the city.

The media and music industry needs more people like Tony. He was passionate about music, and his passion drove him to achieve and create incredible things. I’m sure the words “but where’s the business plan?’ or ‘how does this fit into our strategy?’ never passed his lips.

The world will be a duller place without Tony.

Categories
dab digital radio

The Beginning of an Interesting Post

I started reading a what looks like an interesting blog post from Jack Schofield, but frustratingly I can’t get the “read more” bit to work. (I’m on 3G at the moment, and Orange have a rotten habit of fiddling with the HTML documents to insert their own “helpful” Javascript which inevitably breaks all sorts of things). Maybe you’ll have more luck than me?

What drew my eye was the opening statement : “From portable MP3 players and DAB radio to mobile phones, selling a higher-quality audio format to consumers who don’t seem to care was never going to be easy.”

Well, that’s a truth. Individually, we might not appreciate it. Personally, I might to choose to rip my own audio using FLAC and OGG at very high bitrates. But I’m in the minority. A very small minority. I don’t impose my views on others, in the same way that I don’t appreciate religious evangelists telling me that I’m going to hell unless I change my ways.

If the majority of consumers appreciated high quality audio, MP3 would not exist, there would be no file-sharing, iTunes and iPod would be dead in the water. If they appreciated decent quality video, Freeview would not have sold millions and millions of receivers. But the reality of the world tells us otherwise.

(Update @ 21:02 – have now been able to read the post, and it ends by conceding that “we have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run”. It feels a bit like a gourmet bemoaning the existence of McDonalds).

Categories
dab digital radio radio

WiMax – not radio’s greatest threat

I wasn’t going to follow up on Mark Ramsey’s recently blog post “The Future of Radio Will Be An Experience“, as I thought most of it was bang on the money. However, there was part of it that was bugging me, and a conversation with a colleague in the pub after work on Friday prompted me to respond to one point.

My colleague expressed his concern as “WiMax is going to be a real threat to radio”. Mark postulates the same thing periodically in his blog, and used it as a hook in the posting I’m referring to.

So what did I say to my colleague, admittedly over a couple of pints of Wild Hare, to influence his thinking?

We have a real confusion, in part created by the promoters of new technologies like WiMax, between the “application” and the “bearer”. The application is what the consumer experiences, and the bearer is how they get it. So in this case, the application is “radio” and the bearer is “WiMax”.

I’m very clear that long-term success comes from defining a compelling application. Once you’ve worked out what people will want to use and get excited about, then you work out what bearer is best to get it to them with.

So let me briefly define how I think the application of “traditional mass consumption time-linear radio” will look in the future. Yes, there will be other forms of radio, but this example will expose the issues just as well.

I expect that “radio” will continue to be largely consumed as a simultaneous experience by large numbers of people (10,000 – 100,000+), and it will consist of a selection of audio services accompanied by still visuals, some browseable content and a stream of meta-data describing what’s happening on air. It will be mobile, received on battery-powered handheld devices like MP3 players, and have an astonishingly wide range of devices from £29 (US$60) kitchen radios, home entertainment systems, and continue to be a major part of the in-car entertainment experience. Weekly usage will be almost universal. It will be largely free-to-air and advertising funded.

WiMax is a very interesting technology, assuming that theory and field-tests turn into real-life experiences. It’s designed to be wide-area wireless broadband internet, but to achieve this aim it will need dedicated spectrum. As any user of WiFi devices can tell you, the free-for-all of unlicenced spectrum leads to incredibly unpredictable quality of service, and coverage that changes daily. So WiMax operators, if they are to provide any kind of reliability, will have to purchase dedicated spectrum from government, and that’s not cheap. Ask the mobile phone companies in Europe who coughed up about £20bn (€32bn, US$40bn) for their 3G spectrum. Whatever that spectrum costs, it will have to be shared between the users. Added to that, WiMax base stations will cover relatively small areas (larger than mobile phone basestations, way smaller than traditional radio transmitters) so there will be a lot of them, which increases the cost again. WiMax networks will not be cheap.

So on the surface WiMax works the same way as broadband, and therefore appears to be ideal for “radio”, because “radio” works so well on broadband now. Well, the problem is that it won’t work on broadband. It works now, because so few people, relatively speaking, are using it. I very much doubt that more than 10% of the peak audience of any radio station is through streaming. There has been genuine concern about the effect of applications like Joost and the BBC iPlayer on the general health of the Internet if they become successful. It simply won’t scale indefinately. And if genuine wired broadband won’t scale, WiMax doubly-so.

When demand for capacity outstrips supply, the operators have to start prioritising the capacity, which is called managing the “quality of service”. If your e-mail comes down in spurts, you probably don’t know or mind. If your radio or TV services start buffering and glitching, you get annoyed. So providers of real-time media have much more demanding “quality of service” requirements. The easiest way for the operators to deliver quality of service is to charge the provider a premium to access their network and provide guarantees on delivery. Conversely, anyone who isn’t signed up may find their traffic being shunted down the priority list to a point where it simply doesn’t work some (or most) of the time. It’s a platform lockout.

So if the application is “radio” (as described above), how well does it fix WiMax?

  • The WiMax network would use expensive spectrum and have expensive infrastructure.
  • Every radio would need an ongoing subscription to the WiMax network.
  • Each service would use a proportion of that spectrum and infrastructure, which is finite.
  • The operator may well charge a premium to the service provider for the right quality of service.

So whilst you can, technically, get some degree of radio to work on WiMax, it’ll be considerably more expensive than using a traditional broadcast infrastructure, cost the listener real money for WiMax subscriptions, leave the service providers open to exploitation by the network operators, and make building a £29 kitchen radio almost impossible.

I’m sure some people will believe that “the market will fix these issues” and so on, but these limitations are those imposed by the laws of physics which won’t respond to profit and business planning. If you want wireless wide-area broadband internet, it will be more expensive than the equivalent capacity delivered one-way as broadcast on broadcast infrastructure.

What Mark goes on to describe in his original blog post is a new application of radio which is genuinely threatening. If traditional radio companies can’t create new and interesting applications for radio, then they will get blown out of the water by new entrants. But the emergence of a technology like WiMax simply allows those better ideas to get a foot in the door, and it they become successful, they will end up using broadcast infrastructure because it’s the right bearer for mass-market media experiences.

Categories
dab digital radio mobile

The End of BT Movio – Mobile TV on DAB Digital Radio

BT Movio have announced today that their mobile TV service, delivered via DAB on the DigitalOne multiplex, will cease sometime prior to June 2008. Various reports today have suggested that the service will stay live until January 2008, although it’s not clear if Virgin Mobile (the only network to take the service up) has ever made any firm commitments to their subscribers about a minimum supply period

I have mixed emotions about this turn of events. Only a few days ago, I commented that the BT Movio service was a bold attempt to get DAB technology into mobile phones. Ultimately, the service only appeared in one mobile phone device, the bizarrely named Lobster phone manufactured by HTC.

I know that a great deal of effort went into the engineering of this world-first device, and it is actually a superb DAB digital radio device with an OKay-ish Microsoft Smartphone attached. That’s one of the disappointing facets of this event – that an excellent DAB + Mobile Phone combination will be withdrawn from sale, and there are so many of them left in the warehouse. If BT or Virgin want to minimise their exposure, they would do well to sell the Lobster just on its excellent DAB Digital Radio credentials. It’s got a great EPG, great navigation model and great reception. If it had a DAB Slideshow viewer, it would be nearly perfect from a radio point of view.

The other, often unrecognised, benefit is that BT Movio helped DigitalOne improve their network coverage substantially to provide good handheld portable DAB reception. It will be a real shame if these network extensions, particularly in the London area, are decommissioned. Quite of lot of the improvement in Central London coverage has come from a relatively modest site installed on the BT Tower, which boosts the DigitalOne and London II multiplexes.

Movio’s closure will free up about 400kbit/s on the DigitalOne multiplex. That’s capacity that’s been unavailable to the radio industry, and led to the operation of Core, Capital Life and theJazz in mono. There’s an opportunity there not only to restore those to stereo services, but also to enable some of the data services that should be defining the digital radio experience of the future. Unfortunately, Movio was doubtless carrying a large proportion of the cost of the DigitalOne network which will now fall onto a radio industry that’s having some hard times at the moment. I ferverently hope that the economics of radio have improved markedly before Movio’s funding ends in a year from now.

Some press reports have speculated on a correlation between the European Commission’s decision to get behind DVB-H and Virgin/Movio’s decision to drop their service. The DAB-IP platform used by Movio was always an unique and very proprietory platform, despite efforts to make it a standard in the DAB family. It’s demise is not really that relevant in the wider discussion about mobile TV technology, and DMB still remains a very formidable competitor to DVB-H. It’s outlandish that the EU should tacitly suggest a “not made here” approach to a technology built upon Eureka 147. That’s the kind of thing America does, and you would have thought we (and they) would have learnt about the dangers of blindly supporting the loudest local lobby.

On balance, I believe that Movio’s demise is not a body blow to Mobile TV, nor a significant factor in the DMB v DVB-H debate, but I do believe it provides a very significant opportunity for radio to do something revolutionary in a short window of opportunity. How would it be if DigitalOne was able to let its service providers do something exciting and evolutionary that sparked interest and investment in digital radio and that ultimately made the revenue loss from Mobile TV bareable?

Categories
DMB mobile

DVB-H – A European Standard for Mobile TV?

I know it’s slightly bad form to cross-promote one’s own blog, but as I suspected back in March, the European Commission under the (partisan?) guidance of Mme. Reding has decided that DVB-H should be the best way for mobile TV to be broadcast in Europe. Three cheers from… erm… Nokia, I guess. The Finns will be very happy.

WorldDMB has quite correctly pointed out the appalling anomalies in the logic behind the decision, including the apparent blindness to the fact that DAB (Eureka 147) was as much a European funded project as DVB-H ever has been, and is just as competent bearer of mobile TV. Indeed, EBU studies have shown that DMB can be a more cautious and less financially risky way of implementing Mobile TV than DVB-H.

When something unexpected or inexplicable happens, you have to weigh up whether it was more due to cockup or conspiracy. In this case, with Nokia (a “european” company) being the primary benefactor of DVB-H, and Samsung/LG (“korean” companies) producing the majority of DMB handsets, one feels that the evidence weighs towards a European protectionist conspiracy. If it’s a cockup, then really Mme. Reding and her team of well-looked-after advisers might do the decent thing, and move on.

To a certain extent, I am ambivalent about the issue of mobile TV. DMB has been a very good demonstration of how powerful DAB can be, and how it’s more than capable of integration into the mobile handset. But mobile TV consumes an awful lot of spectrum, and in the UK it does so at the expense of spectrum for radio services. DigitalOne is currently 30% full of a TV service that not many people use (admittedly, not DMB, but an altogether more proprietory Microsoft based system), and that’s what’s squeezing out good DAB Digital Radio services on that multiplex. The economics favour mobile TV, which is a very hard issue for radio people to overcome.

Radio is not a very pretty place economically at the moment, and when the mobile TV industry is flush with speculative investment funding, it’s very difficult to argue that the spectrum allocated to radio should be protected and used to create a new radio experience when there’s no guaranteed income or success. It’s arguably more prudent to take the mobile TV funding, and let radio “get by” on what’s left.

I don’t agree with that. I think we are squandering a time-limited opportunity to reinvent radio, and more critically, rejuvenate the revenues that keep radio healthy. Maybe we need a surge of new investment into radio from entrepreneurs keen to build a new business?

Categories
dab digital radio

4Radio – expectations are high

Channel 4 have been awarded the licence to operate the UK’s 2nd national commercial radio multiplex. Their application was overflowing with enthusiasm and new ideas for DAB Digital Radio, and now the expectation is high that they’ll inject a timely new impetus to DAB uptake.

I’m hoping that they’ll follow through on the promises in the application to develop services that will take advantage of the wider range of DAB functionality, rather than simply migrating an analogue radio experience onto a digital platform. Their E4 radio service is the perfect platform to develop a youth-orientated media offering, centred on radio, but exploiting technology to create a new kind of audio interactive experience. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping Core would be able to do, but DigitalOne have shown markedly less enthusiasm for allowing their service providers to innovate and deliver new ideas. The DigitalOne approach was to launch a mobile TV service (BT Movio) in an attempt to create a trojan horse to get DAB digital radio into mobile phones. Time will show whether or not that was a gamble that will pay off.

If 4Radio can work closely with smart radio producers, and innovative device manufacturers (like iRiver and their B20 device), it could be exactly the kind of service mix that will spark interest in younger people, and MP3 manufacturers, and ultimately lead to a growth in mobile DAB listening and mobile DAB delivered data services. (I note from their application that they’re planning to build a very substantial transmission network which should offer the best mobile DAB coverage we’ve experienced so far).

There were good elements to National Grid Wireless’ bid, and they should be commended. Their openess in positioning themselves as a neutral enabler, encouraging innovation with their service proviers, is in stark contrast to DigitalOne’s position of retaining very tight control over their multiplex. I suspect there is the potential for some of those control elements in the 4Radio business too, and I feverently hope that Nathalie Schwarz and her team have listened to the frustrations that exist in the DAB industry and will allow innovation to come from the service providers.

The other good element to NGW bid was their proposal to move the BBC Asian Network from the BBC National Multiplex, in order to free up capacity. Whilst no doubt there would be a wailing moan from a small number of people about improving audio quality, I rather think the BBC could have done some rather interesting new media things on DAB, particularly for BBC Radio 1. I hope they find a way of doing that still.

4Radio has the potential to be a catalysing element for the next stage of development of DAB Digital Radio, and for the ongoing growth of DAB, that potential must be realised to the full.

Categories
technology

Don’t Sell Me A Service – Sell Me The Clever

Companies have moved from selling products to selling services. I think it’s time for that model to evolve again.

I’ve worked closely for a very long time with a software company.

At first they sold a product; a set of floppy disks which came with a 1,300 page manual. It was a ragingly successful product, which has been distributed on 5.25″ disks, 3.5″ disks, CD, DVD and now probably available as a download. You installed the product on your own PC, and licensed it. With a “product” comes the burden documentation, and lots of testing on all sorts of different hardware/operating system combinations, and lots of telephone support.

About 5 years ago they developed some functionality which was years ahead of its time. Because it looked rather complicated to most people, and demanded some knowledge of SQL and IIS, they decided to make it available as a service; a service that radio stations could make look like their own by putting their own branding and logos on it. Apparently the only clue that it wasn’t being run directly by the radio station was that it was served from a different IP address.

Quite a lot of companies sell services nowadays. On the premise of rapid deployment, and hassle free operation, they offer an apparently beguiling solution to the problem of keeping up with the market. You can buy content management services, community and networking services, text message services, podcasting services. The common thread is that the functionality is bundled up to the point where you just add colour and logo and link to it.

The difficulty with these bundled service is that you end up with little parcels of functionality all over your site, and it’s very hard to mesh it all together in a way that the user might want to use it. It becomes harder to retain consistency of navigation and behaviour, and if you do want to do a change, it means negotiating with a range of different companies to implement it. And of course you end up with segegrated pots of data and content, which makes it virtually impossible to neatly flow learned behaviours/preferences around your site.

I really liked the functionality that this software company offered us, but really hated the service. It just wasn’t right for what we wanted, and it would have been a major job (and cost) to amend it. So I offered to licence just the core code so that we could integrate the functionality deep into our own systems and sites – and to their enormous credit, they agreed. In fact, it helps them too. They don’t need to create a “product”, and they now don’t need to guess our end-user needs when developing the “service”. And we avoid paying for (and almost certainly unpicking) layers we don’t want or need.

The secret of innovating fast is to make small, incremental, steps quickly. Companies with “clever” are more likely to get a sale by allowing their work to be an incremental building block in someone else’s plan rather than trying to provide the whole shooting match. I think I’ll go mental if another company comes to me with some nice functionality that has yet another “content management system” with it. The sum total of content management systems in any organisation should be one. No higher, no lower. One.

I’d be overjoyed if more companies offered to sell me their “clever”.

(P.S. If you’ve got something clever, do let me know. I might be able to find it a loving home nestled in an existing system).