Now On a Mobile Phone Near You: Visual Radio

Michael Hedges April 9, 2005

If you’re in Finland Nokia’s new killer application puts pictures together with FM radio in a cellphone.
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Helsinki radio station Kiss FM tied its 10th anniversary to its participation in the Visual Radio project, launched by hand-set maker Nokia and computer / printer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard (HP). TeliaSonera, a major network telecom in Nordic and Baltic countries, is offering the new service to its customers in Finland with “no registration or service subscription,” according to a press release announcing the launch. Customers do, however, pay for bandwidth, about 7 MB per hour.

The rest of us will have to wait, although Visual Radio will be rolled-out later this year in Europe’s two biggest consumer electronics markets. Virgin Radio in the UK and FFH in Germany are scheduled to try it out, but no firm launch dates have been released. Virgin Radio already launched a 3G service. UK broadcaster GWR, almost officially merged with Capital Radio, is experimenting with a similar service using Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) – also involving HP – that offers website pages streamed with the digital radio signal. Another Helsinki SBS owned station - Radio City - will soon offer Visual Radio content in line with its "rock and sports" format.

Company press releases for Visual Radio have the eerie read of 1950 ads for “talking pictures.” Everybody wins: radio broadcasters move onto the mobile platform, Nokia sells hand-sets, HP sells a service to broadcasters hungry to move onto new platforms, mobile telecoms send bigger bills. The sales pitch is also directed to advertisers and the music industry.  To download a Britney Spears ringtone or buy a concert ticket, the customer simply touches the “red button.”

Nokia and HP first announced the pilot project last April in Cannes. And it left the television wizards yawning. Where, they asked, was the HDTV application? Visual Radio offers nothing more – or less – than a slide show accompanying whatever is on the radio.

Many other cellphone makers offer FM reception. The three Nokia cellphone models come equipped with a FM receiver chip and a GRPS system that pin-points the users location and identifies FM stations available in the area. HP is selling the system that synchronized the audio and video – and consulting – to radio stations and mobile phone operators. Eventually, handset makers other than Nokia will be allowed in.

While it appears as only a step up from RDS – the little text messages that scrawl across LED screens on car radios – it’s a major step. The Visual Radio system includes an interface – now marketed by HP - between a radio stations audio output and the visual elements. That interface is two-way, making it possible – virtually assured – for consumers to interact with the content on the handset. Radio broadcasters sorely need a leap into real interactivity to compete for users who demand it and have two or three other devices in their pocket that deliver it.

As more and more public service broadcasters (PSBs) lobby their governments to expand license fee support to personal computer owners and broadband subscribers, their sights will turn to mobile phone subscribers for yet another revenue source. Although German private broadcasters are waging war at the European Commission over PSBs using license fee money to develop mobile services and PSBs are fixated on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), government accountants will certainly notice that markets could be flooded with a hundred million Visual Radio enabled handsets, as suggested in a recent Nokia press release. At €2 per subscriber per month, that’s nearly €2.5 billion for governments to spend on the PSBs of their choosing. So far only privately owned commercial broadcasters have signed on to the Visual Radio pilots.

Mobile phone operators will be scouring for radio station partners to support Visual Radio by supplying all the content and free advertising. Telecoms will do what they do best: billing. All the clever interactive elements and cute downloads will simply be added to the customers bill. FM radio listening, for now, remains free.

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Stuttgart Station Goes Visual – November 13, 2005
Baden-Württemberg broadcaster bigFM announced last week that they are set to become first in Germany to offer “Visual Radio,” a download system offered by Spodradio. It is not the “Visual Radio” system offered by Nokia and Hewlett-Packard (HP), launched earlier this year in Finland, the UK and radio station FFH in Frankfurt, Germany. One might think the lawyers would have checked out trade names....MORE

Visual Radio: And Don't Forget the Ad Buy - August 18, 2005

Being the biggest mobile phone handset maker, Nokia sets a certain (ring)tone in the market. As a strategy the company wants to give the mobile phone operators, now called “cellcos,” what they want. Everybody in the digital media business still looks for a killer application but the cellcos also want “viral applications,” applications interesting to niche market consumers with publicity value.

Visual Radio does that and several broadcasters in Europe, North America and Asia have signed up. And, why not?

Cellcos want more billable minutes. Broadcasters fear being on the wrong side of technology. Visual Radio offers the idea of interactivity, which broadcasters have come to realize is, indeed, their killer application. In Europe, at least, it’s a challenge to DAB, now a growing part of radio in the UK and other countries.

But the bottomline for commercial broadcasters is the ad buy from the cellcos to promote it...just like the dot com craze ten years ago.

Europeans Like Mobile Phones, But Only for Phone Calls and SMS - June 28, 2005

As mobile phone networks and handset producers add features at a breathtaking rate, Europe’s consumers, so far, are not answering.

Forrester Research released (June 23) a study of mobile phone users – “Europe’s Mobile Consumer” - conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK and found a majority – 63% - “don’t need a sophisticated phone” because it is only used for voice and text messages. A scant 9% of all mobile phone users in the five countries surveyed surf the web via the phone. UK users lead the pack at 15%. Internet browsing is available on nearly half of all mobile phones.

But SMS text messaging is a hit, as anybody near a school zone in Paris, London or Berlin knows. More than two-thirds of mobile phones users send and receive text messages, higher than downloading games or buying those annoying ring tones. Video messaging falls short with only 14% saying “hello” with a smile.