Lots of news today all built around DAB radios built into phones.
First up is Virgin Mobile who have finally launched their Lobster 700 – well to the press at least. This is the phone that’s a Windows Smartphone with a DAB radio built in that lets you listen to the radio and also, via BT Movia bandwidth on the Digital One multiplex, watch television. The four channels that have launched are BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 and E4. None of the commercial channels can currently carry advertising, and Channel 4 is relaying a special mobile service (perhaps shorn of films and foreign acquisitions for which they mightn’t have the rights).
The price for this phone is £199 for pay as you go, although the TV channels cost another fiver a month (except BBC1 which is free and only there on a 12 month trial basis, since all BBC initiatives like this are now subject to public value tests if they’re not trials). So is ITV, Channel 4 and E4 on the go worth £5 a month to you? I’m not sure, although a phone with a DAB radio might be OK. Let’s just hope the battery life is reasonable as DAB is power hungry.
Meanwhile UBC has announced the results of their trial in Birmingham to let people download songs they hear on the radio (in this case Heart) directly to their mobile phone, with a copy going to web-based service to let you download to an mp3 player. I think we can surmise that the file format is likely to be Windows Media with the test phones probably being not dissimilar from the Virgin Mobile in that they’ll be Windows Smartphones with a DAB module built in.
The problem with Windows Media is that the files won’t play on iPods. But that’s long been a problem that the industry has to confront one way or another.
According to the Mediaguardian report, the triallists were willing to download an average of seven songs at £1.25 a pop to their phones. That seems like quite a high spend rate, without getting more details of the users they trialled with. Were they all 16-24? And how much were they paying for the phone usage or for their downloads? And with the trial lasting only four weeks, there’s inevitably some novelty value. The numbers just feel a little high to me, although even UBC are treating these results “cautiously”.
Lots of DAB radios on phones is good, but I feel we need to be a little wary about how much extra revenue these services are really going to generate. My feeling is that it’s much less than the phone companies and service providers might like to imagine it is.