The Reach - Podcasting and other Portable Media Strategies

Tatum Anderson, writing for the BBC, delivers this article today from Delhi. Half the world that currently doesn’t have cell phones is getting creative in finding ways to afford them, use them and profit from their use. Farmers are even getting better prices for their crops due to greater access to information.

While in this blog, you’ve read me postulating regarding the advent of media on phones as the new “iPod”, but this is fundamental change that ulimately can enable worldwide use of phones for media. If farmers don’t get better prices by using their cell phones, there is no perceived value for the phone. This alone will make a huge change in adoption rates and the interest in the carriers and manufacturers serving these geographies.

Finally, some real numbers regarding these threats are shared in an article in the WSJ Online today (subscription required) by reporter Li Yuan.  Sony Ericsson has sold 16.5 million Walkman phones in 14 months (not bad!), Motorola has sold 15 million MP3 enabled phones to date.  Nokia is projecting that in 2006 they will have sold 80 million music phones, which means that in 1 year, they will have outperformed the cumulative sales of Apple iPods (approxmiately 70 million).  So, between the 3 largest cellphone handset manufacturers, that means that there are approximately 110 million MP3 enabled phones on the market today and growing rapidly.

Will Apple roll out the iPhone soon?  One would expect they cannot ignore these numbers  - it certainly is momentum that will not stop.

In the article, the Yuan mentions that Motorola states that about 50% of the MP3 enabled phones are used for music playing purposes - so true penetration and use of a multimedia phone is still some ways off.

As we’ve said here many times - the end game portable media device is the cell phone - not the iPod or other MP3 player.

One of my favorite debates comes front and center in a New York Times article written by Matt Richtel today, which initially focuses on the wave of wi-fi enabled phones.  Belkin has a new wi-fi phone out and T-Mobile as announced a trial in Seattle where their wi-fi enabled phones will switch out between cell coverage and wi-fi coverage as needed to extend coverage areas, particularly in hard-to-reach areas such as homes and businesses.

At the heart of this new wave of coverage extension lies the question of switching between wi-fi networks.  In the case mentioned at the beginning of the article, a reporter tests the Belkin on the front lawn of a New York Times employee, essentially “stealing” his bandwidth.  Didn’t even leave a quarter on the front steps out of courtesy.   

I’m a big fan of using bandwidth I’ve paid for.  Others don’t seem to mind and use the argument “whoever setup the wi-fi router didn’t configure security to be enabled, so they must have been ok with me using it” or something like that.  That argument and others like it are not taking into account the ease of installation of one of those devices and ignorance of the need to set it up.  Do-it-yourself technology is great in one way, but it creates a lot of neophite adopters in the process - and unfortunately the more sophisticated seem to take advantage of disparity in the knowledge delta.

Engadget has a write-up here on a Blackberry 8100 which will be consumer-like in its feature set. Cameraphone, audio and video playback capability, etc - due to be out this fall. The site rumors that T-Mobile will be the first carrier selling it - my sources confirm that. T-Mobile has typically been the first to launch the more slim versions of the Blackberry product line, which uses predictive text for typing, instead of a full QWERTY keyboard.

This continues to confirm our opinion that the phone handset will be the media player of choice.

The real plus, with Blackberry coming out with this device, is that BB has had the best battery management of phones compared with other manufacturers. This will enable the media play capability to have some life along with the phone functionality. As a friend of mine said recently - if my iPod runs out of juice, that’s no big deal. But, if because of my media playing on my phone, my phone dies - I’m dead. Business-wise, that is. I assume….

Saturday, July 29, the NY Times had an interesting article that generated some buzz. You might look at the title of this post and wonder the connection between the three. Well, let me explain. There has been a lot of discussion both here and other blogs, articles, etc. regarding phones as media players. As a matter of fact, as many of you may know, I believe it will ultimately replace the autonomous mp3/mp3 player market.

3G wireless systems have been the buzz in the U.S. for 6 years or more. Will WI-FI or WIMAX over mobile handsets make 3G irrelevant? In the short term, probably not. In the long term? Maybe so. By demanding access to multi-media files on the handsets, consumers will definitely be pressing for this ability. I don’t think 3G has the download speeds to satisfy over the long haul.

As podcasting becomes more mainstream, this too will increase demand from consumers for true broadband (1.5 MBps download speeds) over their wireless systems that support their phone calls. I believe the downloads/portability drives this, rather than “streaming live” in the short term - in that too many things have to be perfect to support that. I can’t always get a perfect live streaming experience over a wired broadband connection today - I think the frustrations would be disastrous in today’s U.S wireless market.

That being said, Japan has been watching live video on their cell phones for 6 or 7 years now. South Korea appears to have at least 1 million receivers (as of June 2006) that have been sold to utilize a system that allows this.

Everyone is trying to get everyone else to adopt their standard. Standardization gets to be a problem when pride gets in our way. On top of that, we have business models that “guaranteed” a certain return to investors - they’re not going to be happy about watching that change. That is a macro discussion that will affect Wi-FI, podcasting, and phones. If the current wireless carriers push the consumers to accept less speed for downloads by lobbying against WI-FI or WIMAX adoption, then the consumer will suffer and the related adoption of media downloads of all types to phones will be delayed. Hmm. Big potential problem, don’t you think?

Bruni Giusanni’s Lunch over IP has a post here, discussing the Informa Telecoms & Media research report stating that there are now more cell phones than people in 30 countries.  Bruni discusses the point that some of this is due to personal and corporate phones, as well as businessmen and other travelers using prepaid SIM cards in the countries they’re visiting.

Regardless, this is a stunning number and I imagine we haven’t seen the end of the growth rate on that either.  He lists the countries and some other useful data on total GSM subscribers.

Fractals of Change shares the true issues at hand on ‘net neutrality and I think skewers the right people and lifts up the right people.  Thankfully, there are a few out there that get it, but it will be an uphill battle.  The boys with the big PR and lobbying dollars have been at it longer.  Let’s catch up - the games not over yet.

This will dramatically affect those of us that are dealing with large file transfers for media distribution.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - it’s not our fault that the telco’s made bad investments or that they’ve fought the wrong battles - we shouldn’t have to pay for them going forward - they should.

Well, it’s nice to be in good company. Apparently, eMarketer is saying the same thing as what’s been running through my mind - the end podcasting device is the mobile phone. Telecomasia writes about it here. Rob Greenlee of mobile podcast pioneers Melodeo, writes about it here, commenting on the Telecomasia article.

As downloading gets easier to accomplish, I see a lot more users actually synching their phone to their computer to copy over podcasts, rather than download them over the wireless network - it gets expensive to do that, although the wireless carriers very much want that to be the workflow.

Several things need to happen to make this come about more quickly - larger storage on the phones themselves and software that easily allows updates to your playlist on the phone. Oh - and increased battery power - let’s not forget that .

Interesting article from CNET about new players from Zing that use Wi-Fi to pull down content when in a hotspot. Conceptually, a good idea; practically poor, since it only has 8MB of storage. I think cell phones will have a much great possibility of impact, as mentioned here before.

More and more cell phones are MP3/MP4 enabled and include Wi-Fi - so what’s the compelling reason to buy a Zing? Upgrade your phone instead, which will have more native capacity, as well as a flash memory/SD card expansion slot (most likely).

To say nothing about “just one device” and the utility of it all….