Analyst perspectives on key wireless industry topics including mobile devices, network infrastructure, mobile operators, mobile content, and short range wireless connectivity.

I just ran across an article in Mobile Entertainment magazine about Nokia landing two operators for its Visual Radio service (O2 in the UK and Hutch in India). It's been more than two years since I first heard about Visual Radio, over dinner with a Nokia product manager in Cannes during 3GSM. At the time I politely told my host that I though the service was, well, stupid. Why, I asked, would someone bother to subscribe to a service that told them about the song they were listening to - after all, wasn't that the DJ's job?

I don't know whether the service has changed since then, or whether I just had too much wine over dinner and didn't fully get all the details, but the service appears to be a bit different, and, I think, it has some potential.

Essentially Visual Radio lets mobile phone customers whose phones have embedded FM radios (a quick look at ABI Research's handset database shows well over 200 handset models have FM radios embedded, and quite a few are Nokia phones) get information about the songs they are listening to. The information includes artist info, album art, etc. Most importantly, it can be linked to a music store, so someone can purchase a copy of the song, a ringtone, wall-paper, and other interactive content. The service requires embedded software on the phone, and while the service is free, customers have to pay for data used to send the information to their phones.

Assuming the listener already subscribes to a data package, the plan sounds good. It provides users with some interesting information, it lets operators monetize another service, and is essentially free to anybody who already has a data plan. Of course, for those customers that pay for data by the byte, it's probably not such a good idea, and for the many millions of prepaid customers, I don't think it will fly at all.

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