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MP3s From The Phone Box
An Economist writes "The .com bubble has come and gone, but the great ideas and implementations are starting to come through thick and fast now. The BBC reports on a planned development in the UK - download MP3s (or the like) from the phone box. Walking along the street and fancy a song - just plug in your iPod/MuVo/iRiver/whatever... awesome! Perhaps the lauded benefits of eCommunication are just beginning to be felt - plus it increases the viability of old-tech phone boxes, which are socially beneficial but financially challenged."
Can somone say $hit or get off the pot? Geeebus, as if people don't take long enough at the phone booth.
Now I can get 16 kbps quality music for 10 cents a minute and 2 bucks a song.
Think about it - they are tergetting a niche market (Ipod owners) with an even nichier product (downloading songs on the road). And, to top it off, how often will a given person do it? Maybe once or twice, for that one time you are own the road and need a particular song. Otherwise, you'd get most of your music at home. I mean, they are losing money with telephone calls (where you might actually get repeat customers), and that doesn't even require them to pay for a high speed connection. No, I suspect this project is doomed already.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Cause its so more practical to load music at a phonebooth, in public, than in the comfort of your home. I don't see the point here, honestly. An Ipod hold so much music that you'll always have something non-boring to listen to anyway.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
"Under the plans, anyone owning an iPod or portable music player would be able to go into a phonebox and download a song while out shopping or on a lunch break."
Well, just about every player has a different method of song transfer. Many require databases to be constructed, and there are so many obscure models out there... Most don't have Line-Ins to record off of, so what are they going to do?
Can't say that I speak for everyone, but I really can't imagine using this service. How often do you find yourself walking down the street thinking "man, I'd pay anything just to listen to some Moby right now"?
And it's not so much the cost. Who wants to stand there, navigate a bunch of menus and wait for a download just for a 3-minute song?
Maybe I'd pay for general internet access, but I can do that at a coffee shop. If I'm tired of what I've got on my iPod, I can always listen to the radio. The concept just doesn't seem to fill a desire.
The last time I used a public phone was probably only a couple months ago, when I was out without my cell phone and needed to phone somebody. Believe it or not, not everyone has a working cell phone on them at all times, and the ability to make phone calls from a public place at a nominal fee really is useful.
Too much repetition my too much repetition!
Kudos for the time-travel-was-only-phase-1 dept. for writing a story that made me actually RTFA, because even after reading it few times in a row I didn't understand a single thing. Now, when I have RTFA and know what are we talking about, I have an idea. Why cannot they install CD-R burners and CD/booklet printers in booths of some sort to allow buying the same music as a customly composed CD having only to reload it with CD-Rs, paper and ink once in a while, while making every single song ever recorded available in the most convenient way imaginable and for relatively low cost and minimal overhead?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Up take for niche services like these requires very low entry requirements - like low price, little registration hazzles, ultra convenient - in order to gain momentum.
And btw, if wireless internet over cellular ever gets realistically cheap - it should just kill off this phonebooth music downloading idea easily.
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
Drug dealers are people too!
Phone booths are for making phone calls. I don't want to download mp3s, read my email, or order takeout from my public phone. For starters I'd like to be able to make calls. With mobiles so prevalent public phone boths are being scrapped and falling into disrepair everywhere. There aren't many places in my local area I can even make a public phone call from a booth anymore.
.com bomb thinking all over again. "I know. Lets put in lots of infrastructure for a small return and wonder why the share price doesn't continue to skyrocket while our losses mount."
What advantage does public phone mp3 offer over at home internet access? If you're on the road there are Internet cafes everywhere already - many of them with 24 hr acces - and provided they'll let you hook into their computer you're all set.
I'd be more excited about wireless broadband downloads on a small mp3 player like the ipod. All you'd need is the wireless modem built in, plus a simple interface to have a music store in your pocket. THAT would be more worthwhile.
Phone booth mp3 downloads are old
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Not all of us either care to or can afford to carry a cell phone with us everywhere we go.
You forget to mention TERRORISTS. And while we're at it, we should ban email, personal ads, and the Post Office is a proven mode of delivery for anthrax. Anyone speaking in a foreign language had better not try that in public either.
iPod compatible? Sounds like Real Networks to me. But I still don't know how they will get the music into your iPod catalog w/o iTunes integration, which Apple is unlikely to give up...
Wi-fi in a portable music player is BATTERY DEATH. Why do people keep mentioning this?! There's no reason, especially when you're in a kiosk to use Wi-fi.
Unless you can get everyone carrying around five pounds of batteries to support the wi-fi music transfers that WOULD NEVER SELL, there is no point. A $2 wire is faster, cheaper, requires no additional hardware for the user, no additional expense for the manufacturer of the player, and already works.
Wi-fi isn't meant for device-to-device communication. The iPod isn't a computer, and I don't really envision someone taking the 2 minutes to set up a secure wireless connection between the iPod & host to transfer a song when they could slap it in the dock, click a button and have it in one second.
And how long befor some enterprising hack , fixes the phone box so that it always downloads Malware into your ipod ?
Master of Peng Shui.Ancient oriental art of Penguin Arranging)
It's a big problem for BT. They are required to maintain the phone box network (and rightly so, about 15% of 999 calls - 911 calls for our American friends - are made using those), but now everyone has a mobile phone there's no way to make money on all but a few boxes at Railway stations etc. They've managed to get the Govt. to allow them to close a lot of phone boxes, but lots remain. It costs £2500 a year to maintain a rural phone box...
Hence the proliferation of ingeniuos ways to make more money. e-mail in phone boxes; putting city mobile phone masts on top of them; now this.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Actually, the main reason we don't get things like this at the same speed as Hong Kong is that practically nowhere has the same economies of scale as Hong Kong. The population density there is insane, so relatively small infrastructure investments can reach huge markets. I have a friend there who has a 10Mbit Internet connection at home, and is paying about half what I pay for a 750Kbit in the UK. On the other hand, a flat the size of mine would be a long way out of my budget if I lived in Hong Kong.
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