@ MWC Interview: Rob Lewis, CEO, Omnifone: Freeing Mobile Music
Omnifone’s MusicStation, a subscription mobile music service giving all-you-can-eat music for £1.99 a week, clocked up over 500,000 track downloads within 10 days of debuting on Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) late last year. But that version might be a drag for network-hopping pop fans, so Rob Lewis was in Barcelona touting new MusicStation Max - a version that, like Nokia’s (NYSE: NOK) Comes With Music, bundles unlimited free songs in to the handset cost.
Right now, there’s only Universal repertoire and no carriers have yet committed to the idea - but more labels are “only a matter of time”, network discussions are “ongoing” and it’s hard to believe talks didn’t take place around Mobile World Congress, where Universal SVP Rob Wells said the “celestial jukebox” is the “utopian future”. Lewis gave me a sneak preview of the prototype LG (SEO: 066570) handset that demonstrates the idea…more on paidContent:UK, here.
Posted In: Entertainment, Music, Countries, Europe, UK, omnifone
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Feb 18, 2008 11:55 AM
“OMA2-grade mobile DRM” means actually Playready. Omnifone has announced a deal with Microsoft also at 3GSM to integrate this technology (marketed by MSFT as a “Content Access Technology” and not “DRM”) into their product offer. I see this as a way for OMF to bridge the gap between their mobile solution & the PC environment where they have not announced anything up to now, probably for financial reasons (the cost to develop a DRM agent that can run inside a PC player & that offers the same use cases as OMA DRM 2.0 is high).
Feb 18, 2008 2:59 PM
This type of flat rate metered payment service is akin to the model described by Gerd Leonhard http://www.mediafuturist.com/ worth checking out.