Monday, March 07, 2005
When a broadcast isn't a broadcast
The BBC report today that Virgin radio are to broadcast on 3G and 2G networks. How do you broadcast on a network that doesn't support broadcasting? You don't - you offer a download service so that people can download the content and listen at their leisure. This has been called pod-casting, because of the popularity of iPods and services that provide downloadable, broadcast-type content for them and similar devices. Virgin cite the high costs of data over mobile networks as a reason for such services being popular only with people with unlimited download deals (somebody tell me how I get one of those).
What this really says to me is that we need a new model of paying for data on mobile networks. When I got my first data capable mobile, about 4 years ago, high data costs were kind of understandable - it was a new thang, not many users, mostly businesses who could afford to pay. but these days I'm still paying out a lot of money just to use GPRS to read my email on the train. this won't change while data is still so profitable for the networks, but the rise of broadcast-type services might just shift the priority towards charging for quality of service and services themselves (eg subscriptions) and not data itself, which ought to be cheap if we're ever to achieve the always-on panacea we keep hearing about.
The BBC report today that Virgin radio are to broadcast on 3G and 2G networks. How do you broadcast on a network that doesn't support broadcasting? You don't - you offer a download service so that people can download the content and listen at their leisure. This has been called pod-casting, because of the popularity of iPods and services that provide downloadable, broadcast-type content for them and similar devices. Virgin cite the high costs of data over mobile networks as a reason for such services being popular only with people with unlimited download deals (somebody tell me how I get one of those).
What this really says to me is that we need a new model of paying for data on mobile networks. When I got my first data capable mobile, about 4 years ago, high data costs were kind of understandable - it was a new thang, not many users, mostly businesses who could afford to pay. but these days I'm still paying out a lot of money just to use GPRS to read my email on the train. this won't change while data is still so profitable for the networks, but the rise of broadcast-type services might just shift the priority towards charging for quality of service and services themselves (eg subscriptions) and not data itself, which ought to be cheap if we're ever to achieve the always-on panacea we keep hearing about.
Comments:
Peter - you're a bit confused here.
We're broadcasting live on 3G radio - www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/mobile/ - as well as producing podcasts - www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/podcasts/
We're not producing podcasts for your 3G phone.
I do agree with your views on bandwidth, though.
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We're broadcasting live on 3G radio - www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/mobile/ - as well as producing podcasts - www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/podcasts/
We're not producing podcasts for your 3G phone.
I do agree with your views on bandwidth, though.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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