“A dropped stream is the nemesis of any regular Public Radio Tuner user. Nothing is worse than being caught up in a great public radio program and have it suddenly cut out….”

Some challenges can be expected:

• loss of signal while roaming from cell to cell. Networks are optimized for voice calls but not for data yet.
• minimal bitrate like 32 kbps is desirable but connection is still not guaranteed and sound quality is no great
• buffers have to be implemented in receiver to mitigate signal loss.

Results of a survey made by PC World suggest that 3G coverage may not be adequate for the delivery of sustained bitrates in major cities in USA. Like this table shows, networks speeds can be impressive but their reliability vary greatly so that live radio transmissions may be hard to achieve.

There is certainly a lot of room for experimentation here in this new area but I tend to believe that it could take a while before we see 3G replace true “physical layer” broadcast networks for live transmissions.

As a first step in this reflexion, I’d like to estimate the total bandwidth of Twitter, that is, how many kilobits per second are being Tweeted on average.

I made a similar exercise some time ago with regards to the blogosphere in a post titled “Broadcasting the Blogosphere: 30 million voices for the price of one!”.

So I found some twitter services that provide relevant data. For example, TweeSpeed is an instant speed meter that shows the current number of tweets per minute. A graph showing the speed per hour during the last week is also available. A quick look at that graph now suggests that 700.000 tweets per hour would be a reasonable approximation for last week’s average, excluding the peek caused by the “Michael Jackson Effect”. Twitpocalypse currently reports 221 tweets per second which results in a similar value (221*60*60 =795.600 tweets per hour ). On another front, the recent HubSpot State of the Twittershpere report provides similar amounts on a daily basis instead of per hour. I suspect that this is a mistake. I’ll be pessimistic and take the largest number. The Hubspot report also informs on the distribution of actual tweet length. I’ll average the tweet length to 110 characters per tweet.

So the math goes like this:

110ch * 1byte/ch * 700k/hour = 77 Mbytes/hour

or

TOTAL TWITTER BANDWIDTH = 170 kbps !

If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.

“Looking like a home router, femtocells give 3G coverage indoors, and use home broadband to connect calls across the Internet to the mobile network.”

“… will be available on different price plans… Essentially, the femto is free to anyone on a £30 contract, and £5 otherwise – including dongle customers”

Femtocells are in fact compact devices (similar to Wi-Fi routers) that act as very low power cell phone base stations that can be installed in end-users premises. Typical cell phones can connect to them instead of the remote “high-power” towers operated by mobile network operators. Femtocells carry the usual communication services through standard Internet connections in homes and offices.

Key benefits to operators (O) and users (U):

• Better in-building coverage (O, U)
• Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
• Off-loading cellular networks (O)
• MNOs can still charge service costs while using end-users resources (Internet) (O)
• Use the mobile device at home at lower rates (U)
• Does not need regular phone service at home anymore (O, U)

Could this femtocell approach be exploited in the context of digital broadcasting as well? At CRC, we have developed a compact software transmitter for DAB. This platform could be further integrated as a low-cost personal DAB transmitter or FemtoDAB cell!

Such a FemtoDAB approach could offer interesting benefits:

• Better in-building coverage (O, U)
• Overall network infrastructure can eventually be operated at lower power levels (O)
• Outdoor, indoor roaming with the same device (broadcast enabled handhelds) (U)
• Transmission of additional Internet radio content in the femtoDAB cell (U)

One of the challenges will be to make FemtoDAB more attractive than the Wi-Fi options.

Do you see any use cases for FemtoDAB?

Isn’t that the case with FM radio? Will it truly benefit from going digital?

One of the compromise I find attractive is starting to emerge: enabling mobile phone handsets to receive FM AND RDS. Such an effort led by GSS and Silicon Laboratiroes is reported here at RadioWorld.

GSS believes that cell phones that can receive FM without cumbersome headphone antennas will not only be more popular with consumers but can then put RDS capabilities into the hands of many more consumers, which in turn will better support the penetration of emergency alerting systems like its Alert FM.

As we mention in our recent EBU paper, new functionality in handsets will be done in software. This is quite new in the mobile world but we are definitely used to this principle with our personal computers. We buy software for them. That’s what makes them extremely flexible, evolutive and thus useful. This paradigm emerges on mobile phone platforms now because they are evolving as generic and powerful computing platforms too.

This trend was identified early on by Apple (as usual) who created the AppStore as part of the iPhone ecosystem. The AppStore creates a marketplace for developers and end-users. Developers offer their new creations through the system, typically for a small fee, while end-users shop for applications through iTunes. The whole process of purchasing, installing and removing applications has been streamlined to provide a “frictionless” end-user experience, apart from the few dollars that one has to leave on the table!

I believe that the key benefit from these new marketplaces for applications is innovation. A democratized marketplace for innovation.

Before, application innovation was limited to MNOs and key partners of the mobility value chain. Now, anybody can create new applications. New applications will come from the masses, like Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube came from new players and non-incumbents.

Also, with more open marketplaces comes increased competition. That is good for consumers. End-users are only one click away from competing applications.

And what if the competing application is free? Such platforms will make “free” and “pay for” applications equally accessible. Could this lead to the erosion of the software market? Many think so. In order to sell their apps, developers will have no other choice but to offer leading edge products with truly exclusive features.

What does this mean for broadcasting? At the moment not so much I guess. The perspective is attractive though. What if moving from DAB to DAB+ could simply be achieved through a new software app. A broadcaster would announce the move and asks its listeners to go buy the 2$ piece of software on the app store. In exchange, end users get more channels. Click, pay, download, … voila! What if all new broadcast applications could be offered this way? EPG, Slideshow, TPEG traffic overlay for google maps,… and so on. In fact, we don’t know what the mobile broadcast applications of the future will be. But we know it will be in software. We just need broadcast receivers in those handsets.

Well, it looks like this project was killed. May I suggest a strategy: Google, release your automation software to the open source community like you did with Android. This could attract new developers that support your AdSense program for free… and some competing options, of course!

Before that, they appear on iPlayer, the free service which notched up 41m programme requests in December and 271m during the whole of 2008.