> Michael Turner wrote:
> > [...]
> > Mobile phones are voice-delivery devices FIRST (in fact,
> > *real-time* audio-delivery devices, though that doesn't
> ^^^^^^^^^^^
Juergen Specht replied:
> If you ever telephoned with somebody next to you, you will
> see that there is a delay of almost one second between the
> movement of the mouth and the voice in your ear...this is
> not real realtime, right? ;)
Getting pedantic here: "real-time" doesn't mean "instantaneous",
it means "responds within a fixed amount of time, or by a
certain time." Talk radio, for example, is still technically
real-time even though it might be delayed 10 seconds to
allow censors to bleep out obscenities. Phones actually
fail this test, since there is no guarantee of 100% delivery.
Anyway, as I said, real-time response doesn't really matter
for what I'm talking about. Or, at any rate, it doesn't
require more real-time performance than the system
already has.
> > Which is to say: most truly effective bulk content delivered
> > in the near-term will be probably be audio, and more
> > specifically, voice, not visuals, since voice is what handsets
> > are optimized to deliver within the packaging constraints.
Jurgen:
> Since online connections (here: calls) are still very expensive,
> i think the future is more an integrated MP3 player and a stereo (!)
> plug to switch your headphones in. So you can download audio and
> hear it with only one device you already carry with you.
That's the future. What I'm talking about is something that could
be done now. Yes, celphone connections are expensive, but with
people paying upwards of 95 yen (about $1) just to download
pictures of cartoon characters, is it really so objectionable to
stay on-line to hear a two-paragraph news report for, say,
10 yen? If you have half a dozen such selections read to you
over the phone, you might be getting all the news that you'd
read yourself anyway from a newspaper, at a total
price less than what you'd be charged at the newstand for
a bulky paper that you might not read more than a fraction
of, anyway.
> I know that NTT is working (or are they finished yet?) on a system,
> where you can download complete songs (real songs, not only tunes)
> over their network with a modified handset...
In my post, I emphasized voice, not audio per se. And news, not
musical vocals. All good telephony pyschoacoustics work starts
with this assumption: voice signals, which are far more constrained
than music, or sound generally. Most music coming over phone lines
now is hold-line muzak; the voice channel is not optimized for
continuous, high-fidelity delivery of music and probably never will be.
MP3 downloads are probably the way to go for getting music through
your mobile. News, however, seems like something that
could be done *now*. There's so little client-side storage needed.
> but nobody ever had talked about 'radio' (= realtime) as far as i
> know.
I probably didn't make this clear: I don't mean real-time *broadcast*
delivery of voice - radio already does that perfectly well. Rather,
I mean canned audio delivered over-the-ether, with selections
made through a browser: presentations recorded on the server
side that, unlike radio, could be instantly replayed, accessed
again and again, or (most importantly for news stories) simply
skipped. I see no obvious technological barrier. Probably the
main question is whether there's a market.
> Future will tell.
Actually, I wonder if this might be a case of what Bruce
Sterling calls "predicting the present"? Anybody know whether
someone's doing what I'm talking about here? Or knows of
technical obstacles to doing it?
> J.
-m
Received on Sun Jul 16 07:17:09 2000