In the news from the UK:
GCap believes it is the first radio group in the world to be streaming live radio to Apple’s iPod Touch music player and the iPhone and it sees big opportunities to reach new listeners while also developing revenue streams from selling music.
As this picture shows, this is a pretty dreamy interface.
No “HD tagging” required. No HD radios required, in fact. Why buy a new radio in order to tag your songs when you can do it on an iPod right now?
Just point your iPod here.
It’s not exactly effortless, but it works great. Brilliant!
From there they can stream a station, access podcasts and look up the last five songs played. They can buy one of those tracks from Apple’s music store, iTunes, or get a whole CD album from the online retailer Amazon. GCap gets a cut of those retail revenues. The service still has glitches, including the fact that wireless broadband delivery makes it hard to listen to radio on the move. Accessing iTunes or Amazon to buy music also stops the radio stream, something GCap’s technology team hopes to iron out.
And what’s ahead?
GCap also hopes to develop the iPod service so listeners can tag, or bookmark, news items, interviews and promotions they hear and then return to them when they have more time. For example, they could bookmark a promotion for free tissues, said Pembrooke, and when they re-visit the item the pack of tissues is automatically sent. As well as developing “enhanced ads”, GCap wants to make its stations available on other new devices coming onto the market.
The main difference between what these guys are doing and what we’re focused on in the US is this:
In the US we are obsessed with making HD radio work. While GCap is evidently obsessed with making their brands work, wherever listeners can and will experience them.
Woe unto you if the technology is more important than the brands which that technology will carry.