Sprint gets the beat with Rhapsody Radio
posted Sep 19th 2005 5:45PM
If you're a Sprint Nextel customer suffering Cingular envy since you can't get
the iTunes ROKR (yeah, we know, but humor us on this for
a minute), you can now get your music going with a version of Real's Rhapsody Radio, which Sprint will offer for $6.95
per month. Just in case you're keeping track at home, that's about double the price of the cheapest PC-based Rhapsody
Radio offering, though we guess the premium is worth it, since, in addition to Rhapsody Radio's package of streaming
music stations, you get the instrumental "Beats 'n' Breaks" service, which lets you sing along to instrumental-only
versions of popular songs. So, for $6.95, you basically get a poor man's Sirius (even though you can already
get the real thing on Sprint), plus the opportunity to
own a karaoke phone. Suddenly that ROKR's looking pretty good.
I work with a guy who got the ROKR. Its actually not that bad. Kind of cool actually.
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I was at CTIA yesterday, and I got to hear this new Sprint/Rhapsody service. Wow it sucked. It's AM radio all over again. I just can't believe how bad this sounded. I can't imagine how anyone would buy it. The bitrates are so low, and they're using older Real Audio codecs, and well, it was unlistenable.
They're apparently using the same codecs they use for talk programming, not music quality ones. Or else they're just being cheap and doing it all at 20kb.
There are 2 issues with getting good music on phones: most of the phones don't support the best codecs. There is only one phone that Sprint sells (the Samsung 800) that supports aacPlus, the only codec that sounds as good or better than FM radio. Most of the other phones support plain AAC (which sounds OK at low bitrates, but still more like AM radio and not nearly as good as aacPlus). But the Rhapsody service is being delivered using RealAudio codecs, and the quality is horrible and so not worth $6.95 a month.
The same goes for Sprint's Sirius service as well. Sirius over the phones sounds like AM radio. Good AM radio, but AM none the less. Why would anyone pay for this if they were interested in music? It doesn't have to be this way. If they wanted to, Sprint could deliver better quality audio than Satellite!
I just don't understand what the wireless phone industry is doing. They're selling consumers these services which frankly suck, and not working on making them work well or sound good. The industry is going to kill music on the handset at this rate. While there are more and more phones coming out that support aacPlus (which is part of the MPEG4 Standard as well as the 3GPP standard), most of these phones are not enabled to playback aacPlus streams! What are they thinking?!?! Some of the phones only support aacPlus for their RINGTONES! How backwards thinking is that!??!
Now of course I'm biased - I run SomaFM.com and we've been broadcasting aacPlus to the few compatible 3GPP phones out there for 6 months now. We know how good this can sound. In fact, we demo'ed our (free!) service in the Coding Technologies booth with the Samsung 800 phone hooked to some big KRK studio monitors. I was even surprised how good it sounded. (I think it sounds better than satellite radio sounds; and it should - it's the same Codecs that XM uses, but our average bitrate is higher - 40kb vs 32kb).
And not even the Samsung 800 phone gets it right. If you're streaming a radio station, it asks you on the display every 10 minutes if you want to continue. If you don't press OK in the 15 seconds before it times out, it drops the stream. Do they really think people want to listen to 10 minutes of radio at a time?
If the mobile handset is going to replace the radio as the wireless execs would have you believe, they really have to solve these problems.
As a broadcaster, I'm frustrated by the fact that the technology exists to give people a great mobile handset radio experience, but the pieces aren't coming together. And everyone is busy making deals with established brands to bring the same content everywhere and announcing it triumphantly, the emperor has no clothes.
If it sounds like crap, why would a consumer want to buy it?
The carriers have to wake up, and get well thought features for listening to radio into the phones, which includes great audio quality. If you can't sound better than Satellite, then don't bother.