Paul Fairburn's Blog

Cliq - R.I.P.

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Fairburn) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:06:00 +0000

I was saddened by the news that Cliq was being closed by UBC. I have some good friends there, and they were trying to do something innovative for radio and the music industry.

The basic idea is a good one – let people buy music when they hear it on the radio (and share some revenue with stations). Radio is a major way people to discover music, so why not have a button on the radio marked “BUY”, for when discovery turns into desire.

Well… there are many issues, so here goes:

The music you buy has to be delivered to you. If the radio can store your bought music, perfect. PCs and mobile phones are the closest to this ideal. GCAP, and Emmis in the US, have forged good partnerships with iTunes to make this as smooth an experience as possible - but it's not going to make station owners rich. It will provide listeners with a useful service which is, of course, a "good thing".

A “BUY” button on a car or kitchen radio would be a much bigger proposition. Much more listening takes place on these, leading to more purchases… But these devices, to date, haven’t been equiped to communicate with music stores online. This is what UBC will be working on in future, it seems.

On PCs the biggest problem is the competition from “free”. On mobile phones you’ve got DRM issues and data transfer costs. UBC could have hung on until they'd sorted out DRM-free deals with the majors, and Virgin Media had threatened illegal downloaders to within an inch of their second-lives... but hanging on costs money.

So what about putting the "BUY" button into digital radios. Cliq started out as a DAB radio initiative. But only one UK phone was ever capable of receiving DAB, hosting the Cliq software and connecting with a music store via the internet – the Virgin Lobster. (A design which oddly went against the trend for slim small phones, and actually contained pockets of thin air inside!)

The DAB technology isn't the problem - nor the battery life, as some have suggested. It's down to the mobile networks' business model.

If Vodafone want to sell their customers music, charge them for streaming and other entertainment services – why allow a manufacturer to put a DAB chip in their new phone. The chip would deliver free entertainment, and allow third parties to take the music revenues instead of Vodafone?

The networks routinely tell handset manufacturers which features are turned on in the phones they sell to their customers. Not every Nokia XYZ is the same - they differ, by network, ever so slightly. The operators probably don’t see any reason to subsidise phones that eat their lunch. It's our job to give them a reason, perhaps?

This isn't to say that DAB isn't going to get into mobiles - it is. But it's not happening fast enough for UBC right now.

In what was a good move, it seemed to me, Cliq came out with a java app. Suddenly the potential customer base wasn't just a few people with a DAB phone. It was everyone with a decent mobile phone and a basic data contract. But getting world+dog to load java apps onto their mobiles is a major exercise in persuasion, with a marketing cost attached. The numbers probably didn't add up.

So - where does this leave DAB. Well - GCAP's withdrawal from some aspects of DAB doesn't mean it's a dead technology. People like their DAB radios, and they're still selling well. New DAB radio operators are entering the market - such as Planet Rock's new owners. It's just that the costs of DAB transmission aren't trivial. (There's a close comparison to be made with web-businesses. How many web start-ups have low costs and great revenues. Not many.)

Does DAB need a new killer application? It wouldn't do any harm. I'm not sure music downloading is a killer - but it's something that will happen eventually and it will help, in its own way, to make even more people love their DAB radios.

So - good luck UBC with the business-to-business work. Should be interesting.

Mobile TV - Big surpise?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Fairburn) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:12:00 +0000

Today's news from Deloitte was hardly a great surprise.

Mobile TV will fail to take off this year, as consumers cut the amount of cash they spend on their mobile phones, according to a major new report by Deloitte.
Less than 1% of the UK population currently watches mobile TV and Deloitte estimates that the figure will fail to increase this year, due to consumers cutting back on "discretionary spending"
(that's according to Brand Republic).

This is on the back of reports that Nokia is disappointed by low impact of DVB-H.

It seems to me that Mobile TV is one of those acitivities which is always about to explode "... next year". I recall being at a European conference about mobile TV in 2007 (James Cridland and I were there to explain why radio should have a place in their hearts - not sure we succeeded). The organisers asked for a show of hands from "everyone who thinks they'll make money in mobile TV in the next five years". If any hands went up, there were no more than two sheepish ones.

So while the EU's Viviene Redding is a fan of DVB-H, the mobile networks are being... er ... cautious. Okay - O2 are bidding for L-Band spectrum, but maybe mobile broadband is in their minds more. (Don't know, to be honest)

Seems to me they don't want the other networks to make a success of mobile TV and leave them behind. But none of them are anywhere near making it a success even on their existing 3G networks. They're investigating using the 3G spectrum they already have using novel techniques like TDTV. They know that there's money to be made if we can all be tempted to watch premium content on those "5 minutes to waste" occasions. But, in between updating your facebook/twitter, and checking your email, that will only work if the content is wonderful...

Then there are the rights. Nobody is watching. Rights holders want to charge a fortune for anything worth watching. The result; mobile TV will continue to be "next year's big thing".

(If you're reading this in the year 2014, and mobile TV is everywhere, I'm sorry!)

Orange Liveradio - it's rather good

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Fairburn) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:33:00 +0000

I bought myself my first wifi radio this week. I decided to get the Orange Liveradio, mainly because I'd seen one at last year's Digital Radio Show, and I figured that Orange have had time to add the features that early wifi radios had missed.

I'm really pleased I did. The set up is easy, though don't reboot your router while the Liveradio's updating its software (!) A lot of setup can be done online once you've registered your Liveradio. So - what can it do?

1) It can stream any station you can get the stream URL for, and some you can't if the station has registered with Orange's content partner.

2) It can play any podcast that's still available for download (you just need the xml/rss details)

3) It can play music from any suitable computer on your network, e.g. using Windows Media Player 11. It does seem to need uPnP turned on, which can be a security problem for routers - but that's your call. I already had that turned on for the X-Box.

4) It can play audiobooks. The standard list appear to all be librivox recordings - all out of copyright, recorded by housewives in Ohio, it seems!

Anything less than perfect with it? Well, so far just two things occur to me;

First, the speakers aren't incredible - but I guess that's to avoid battery problems with bass-rich sound. Second, when you register with Orange to get all the features working you can't easily opt out of their 3rd party database marketing. You have to separately contact customer services. I've done that, and hope it works.

A neat device...

Web Stats - How Important is accuracy?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Fairburn) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:00:00 +0000

The news that the Telegraph.co.uk site’s Unique Users shot up by 38% in a month was rightly the cause of much bragging at the Telegraph.

The fact that this coincided with a change in webstats vendor was seized upon by .. er.. The Guardian. I’d do the same in both their sets of shoes.

It highlights a little secret in the online world. It’s the most measurable of media, but that doesn’t mean the stats are accurate! ABCe will audit and confirm that you aren’t fibbing. But they don’t check to make sure you’re catching all the visits and views you could. The parallel in old media – radio – is where a radio station draws its survey area on a map and misses a few listeners on the fringes of its area. RAJAR doesn’t tell them to get their act together. It just counts the people inside the area.

Inaccurate stats don’t need to bother a website owner. The only metric that truly counts is revenue. Oh, and profit. I’ll talk about that other dirty secret another time (Facebook anyone?)

Because revenues come from either advertising or direct online sales, the raw traffic numbers aren’t terribly important. If your site is so badly constructed that users thrash around looking for something they need, you get better time-spent and more page impressions. So what? They only bought as much as from your store as on a better laid out site. With online merchants it’s just the sales that matter.

Maybe those page imps get you more advertising money? Well – not if the user is ignoring them in their ever more maddening attempts to find what they want. With advertising, the agency or client can measure what they care about – sales and traffic to their sites.

Edward Roussel, digital editor for the Telegraph, said that "It is hugely dependent on the quality of your search engine optimisation…” That’s true for my examples as well. Do you want to optimise for traffic numbers, or for revenue? There is a difference. Getting a high Google rank for a phrase that’s not going to make you money is just vanity. Optimisation should be about optimising revenue… end of.

So – well done to the Telegraph for getting a better stats package (and for using it almost correctly). Well done to the Guardian for spotting the story.
Now who’s making the most money?

And the winner was...

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Fairburn) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:01:00 +0000

Interesting news from Hitwise about the top websites in the UK, in various of their categories. Any claims to know absolute traffic numbers for all UK sites should be taken with a large amounts of sodium chloride. But I see that bebo was the top social network (remember this is traffic, not membership).

The top Business Directory was maps.google.co.uk. Adding a business to this market leading directory is free but a lot of businesses don't seem to have bothered.

The third "winner" that caught my eye was in Sport and Fitness. No longer the preserve of fat blokes buying cans of WD40 to affect a miraculous revival of their elderly Vauxhalls - the winner was Halfords. I assume its all the bikes they sell, though there's a slim chance that WD40 is a performance enhancing drug that isn't yet illegal. It does, after all, seem do everything else.

Mine's a pint..