$1.25 is the Magic Price for Music Downloads
Usable Products Company recently completed a report called the Key Drivers to Media Downloads, which studies behaviors and attitudes of US consumers with regard to mobile phone downloads of music, video, games, ringtones, and wallpapers. The study found that $1.25 is the magic price for music downloads to phones, with the right to also download to a PC or MP3 player, otherwise known as a “dual license.” However, Verizon currently charges $1.99 for V CAST music and the Sprint Music Store charges $2.50 per download. These prices contrast with the accepted industry standard, Apple’s iTunes pricing of $0.99 per song.
Why are Sprint and Verizon charging so much more for dual license music downloads? There are several good reasons: the cost of the pipe, revenue sharing, customer support, and possibly even limited network capacity. “The pipe” is the wireless data connection that transmits the music from the data store to the mobile phone. Building the infrastructure to support music downloads has been hideously expensive, and the carriers need to recoup that cost. Apple’s iTunes does not have that cost: customers bring their own Internet access. Carriers share music download revenue with the service providers who provide the online music stores. Apple built and owns iTunes. Both Apple and the carriers share revenue with the media rights owners, but Apple’s volume is significantly higher, resulting in more favorable pricing.
The user experience of downloading media to mobile phones is awkward at best, resulting in a Customer Support nightmare for the carriers. Apple supports a single device, the iPod. Yes, there are perhaps a dozen different iPod models in use today, but they all have the same user interface and every iPod relies on iTunes to transfer music. Apple controls the ecosystem for iPod music distribution. Not true for Verizon or Sprint, who control only the network, not the software or hardware that must work together seamlessly in order for music to get to the phone. It is impossible to determine Verizon’s and Sprint’s network capacity, but pricing the media higher than customers will accept could be a way to keep consumption down in order to tune the network and grow it according to customer demand. However, that logic goes against common sense. Gouging the early adopters seems more likely to kill the service before it even hits its stride.
How did I arrive at $1.25 as the “magic price”? In the Key Drivers study, only 2% of survey respondents said they would pay as much as 30% more for a dual license. The ratio changes significantly as the price drops: for example, 11% of respondents were willing to pay 20% more for a dual license. However, 35% were unwilling to pay any extra to play music on more than one device. Usable Products provided this data and I decided that $1.25, 26% more than the $0.99 currently charged by iTunes, is exactly right. Only 13% of the respondents would be willing to pay $1.25, but that’s what they said. Once consumers realize the convenience of downloading music whenever and wherever they want it, I predict that music download services will take off.
In focus groups conducted by Usable Products in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and New York, respondents were asked about the pricing of downloadable ring tones and music as compared to Apple’s 99 cents-per-song pricing. One respondent stated, “If I can get it online for $0.99, I wouldn’t buy it on my phone for $3” (Chicago, 14-17 year-olds). Another respondent stated, “If I had to choose between buying an iPod or a phone that plays music—but I’d have to pay more for the music on the phone—I’d just buy the iPod” (Chicago, 25-45).
We’ve established a disconnect between what the phone companies are charging and what consumers are willing to pay. Consumers want to enjoy music on their mobile phones. 62% of survey respondents want digital radio. 51% want downloadable songs. However, consumers don’t want to pay a lot more money for the privilege. They do not understand the additional hassle and costs involved in pumping music through the wireless pipe. Consumers don’t care and they should not need to care—that’s the phone company’s problem. However, the costs and operational issues of transmitting a large chunk of data through a wireless phone line are considerable. We know that, but once the problem is solved, the carriers should be able to make it up with volume.
In Usable Products' Media Download Usability study, respondents spent nearly five minutes to shop for, purchase, download, and install a 20-second ring tone—and only 73% of study participants succeeded. We’ve talked about pricing, and only now touched on the usability of these services. Downloading music is more complicated and challenging than downloading a ring tone. Fixing the pricing will be an excellent first step. Next up, usability.
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April 22, 2006
Moto RAZR Successor Has Better UI
Motorola has leaked photos of the upcoming RAZR "successor" via Engadget. The important thing to notice on this phone (shown above) is the lack of a menu button. The menu button is a real source of usability challenge for people, and Motorola must have figured that out along the way.
No one is truly impressed with the industry's snail's pace of innovation in user experience, but eliminating the menu button is a step in the right direction. You can see the menu button in the existing RAZR model's photo at the right, above the five-way directional control. If you're wondering why the menu button has no label, you're not the only one.
In Usable Products' Keypad Trouble video retrospective, the problems with the menu key are made truly apparent through the use of video clips with participants complaining how they don't understand what "that middle button" is for. Participants also complain about the proximity of the center OK button to the four directionals and how all the button surfaces are flat, thereby making it difficult to press a direction without pressing the center OK button. Heck, Moto can't fix everything in one release, now can they?
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April 17, 2006
Prototyping for Mobile Phone Deployment
There are several platforms usable for mobile deployment prototypes.
1. SVGt 1.1+ and the Ikivo Animator, using XHTML as a wrapper
2. Adobe Macromedia FlashLite, using the Flash authoring system
3. WAP by itself
SVG is the Scalable Vector Graphics format. Ikivo Animator is an animation authoring package. You can create graphical files, representing user interfaces, in any graphics editor that outputs SVG. Adobe Illustrator outputs SVG. Ikivo Animator supports SVG animations of these files with an intuitive graphical user interface. Combining the animations with XHTML enables the prototyper to simulate more elaborate user interactions. Getting the content to the phone depends on the equipment, accessories, and any data plan set up for the equipment. With the Sony Ericsson W600i, we were able to transfer files using the included data cable.
Adobe Macromedia FlashLite player, available on many phones, enables Flash authoring to be deployed on handsets in a similar manner to the SVG described above.
Lastly, WAP can be used as a prototype delivery mechanism. Coding the WAP pages and serving them is up to you.
We have been prototyping handheld applications for some time. Flash is the easiest, but it’s far from easy.
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April 14, 2006
Talking up a BlueStreak with Tucker Snedeker
I met with Tucker Snedeker, VP of Mobile Business Development of Bluestreak, who demonstrated Bluestreak’s technology, which runs even of 50 MIPS processors with less than a megabyte of memory. It competes with Adobe/Macromedia’s FlashLite player, and runs SWF files natively. Bluestreak’s primary successes in the past three and a half years have been with cable TV set top box deployments, and they are now pushing into mobile.
Bluestreak is not a FlashLite player, but can read and run Flash files. It’s a multimedia engine that “just happens to support the Flash format.” It is also an ECMA script engine. FlashLite 1.1 is not supported, but instead Flash as web developers know it, a more robust, capable scripting engine with a Flash 7 development profile. ActionScript is a mirror image of ECMA script.
Bluestreak leverages the Flash authoring environment with a set of tools that plug in and enhance the authoring environment especially for mobile deployment. Bluestreak does not support every feature, such as Flash Video—FLV. Instead, 3GPP, Windows Media, and other standards are supported by Bluestreak.
Bluestreak is deployed on Orange for their Orange World TV, a 52-channel live streaming TV service, launched in February 2006. Also, Bluestreak supports Orange’s League One soccer product. Tucker demonstrated the Orange World product, and it was fast, smooth, and played video like a champ. He even showed me a rich SMS authoring application, proving their tight integration with native phone functions.
The key advantage of Bluestreak is terrific performance even on very low end hardware, with a truly attractive price point.
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CTIA Keynote Day 2
Van Toffler, President of MTV Networks’ Music/Films/Logo group was full of surprises. He spoke about the new programming coming down the pike from MTV Wireless. They’re planning to (first surprise) develop original audience-generated content. They are getting back to their “ADD roots” by deploying shorts in the five to fifteen second time slice, similar to the original MTV “art breaks”. MTV’s third pillar of content is music—another big surprise. MTV channel on the handsets will break bands—another surprise. MTV was once a pioneer, and they still refer to themselves that way.
BET (Black Entertainment Television)’s Debra Lee, Chairman and CEO, spoke about the artist D4L launching four million ring tones and achieving success through ring tones purchases by their audience. Hip hop is a recurring theme at CTIA; I remember hearing P. Diddy speaking at CTIA in Atlanta a couple of years ago. The hip hop audience is full of wireless early adopters.
Amp’d Mobile and Verizon, mobile video purveyors, were notably absent from CTIA, though each had announcements. Amp’d plans to launch its own original television content. I suspect they’re getting it for free, as a means to launch indie artists. It’s a great gig for both parties.
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April 06, 2006
Full Fidelity Vibration and User Interface
Haptics is the technical term for adding the sense of touch to a human-machine interface. In a mobile phone context, the simplest implementation is full-fidelity vibration. Immersion Corporation in San Jose, California, is the world leader in haptics technology. I met with Jeff Eid, VP of Mobility Business Development at Immersion Corporation. He demonstrated Immersion’s latest deployments of touch technology in mobile telephone handsets from Samsung, shipping through ten operators around the globe today, including Orange and T-Mobile in Europe, Verizon, Sprint and Alltel in the US, SKT and KTF in S. Korea, and China Mobile.
According to Eid, “Immersion’s full-fidelity vibration, called VibeTonz, has found its initial application in gaming. With the advent of music handsets, we expect the technology to be used more widely to identify callers through vibration-enhanced ringtones. We see additional applications in mobile user interfaces to enhance things like the use of touch screens and various alerts.”
Touch screens offer no affordances for when buttons are pressed. People touch the screen and don’t feel anything. Haptics is an almost magical solution to that problem, offering force feedback to indicate to the user the button action is initiated. Button size too small? Make it larger. Too much information to fit on two soft keys? Add buttons to the screen.
Gaming: Highway Racer from Pulse Interactive is a fast paced motorcycle game deployed through BREW on Samsung N330 handset from Verizon. When the accelerator (2 digit) is pressed, the driver can feel the acceleration. Similarly, driving off-road feels rougher than driving on the road, and crashing feels like a thundering explosion.
Contact Jeff Eid for information about Immersion’s haptic technology.
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April 04, 2006
Wireless RERC
Jim Mueller is the Project Director of User Needs Assessment for the Wireless RERC (Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center) in Atlanta, Georgia, a US Department of Education-funded research center endeavoring to work with mobile carriers and handset manufacturers to create products that are usable by people with disabilities: sensory, cognitive, and physical. Sensory disabilities include hearing and sight—and not only complete blindness, but differing levels of sight, which is true for each of the disability classes: some people can’t walk, and others have difficulty walking but can walk with assistance.
Jim is speaking at the Wireless Accessibility Workshop at CTIA on Wednesday 5 April 2006, and he was kind enough to speak to me the night before the workshop about how his group can most effectively support improvements to the wireless user experience for disabled people. I suggested that Jim contact carriers, who are the true customers of the handset manufacturers—mobile phone end users buy from the carriers, after all.
Reader challenge: if you know someone or are yourself involved at a manufacturer or carrier, and have interest in helping people with disabilities, please contact Jim directly. He is seeking contacts who are responsible for handset buying, specification, and marketing. His group is working to put numbers to the buying power of people with disabilities, whom we all agree are under-served.
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April 03, 2006
Welcome
This blog is a place where I will showcase interesting handheld products and my own thoughts on usability and design for phones and small electronic devices.
