Contact:
Julian Mattocks
Phone: +43-1-81140-308
E-Mail: mattocks@pressetext.com
| Pressbox | 
|
London/Helsinki (pte023/13.01.2005/11:15) - British radio station Virgin Radio http://www.virginradio.co.uk has teamed up with Finnish mobile giant Nokia http://www.nokia.com to launch a new "visual radio" service in the spring that will offer pictures as well as sound. As the Media Guardian http://www.mediaguardian.co.uk reports, the broadcaster said its new interactive service would make it easier for listeners to interact with Virgin Radio using their mobile phones, on a 24-hour, seven days a week basis.
Visual radio, developed by Nokia, works by sending images to mobile phones that are synchronised with the station's play list. Listeners can use their mobile phones to tune into Virgin and vote for play lists, rank particular songs, take part in competitions or buy ringtones and tracks by clicking on the various images, rather than sending just text messages. Virgin will create the visual content using special software developed by Nokia and computer giant Hewlett Packard, which is then broadcast to mobiles.
According to James Cridland, the head of new media at Virgin, the service would help increase the length of time listeners tuned in on their mobiles, as well as providing important demographic information to advertisers. "We know that what we've done on the internet that added interactivity boosts our listening hours, with 79 per cent of listeners who use the website tuning in for longer," he said. "Secondly there's an advertising benefit. For the first time we now know who is listening from the moment they first interact with us. It's adding the red button to radio in the same way that BskyB adds it to the TV," added Cridland.
Nokia is set to introduce two new visual radio enabled mobile handsets to kickstart the service and claims there will be 100 million of the sets worldwide by the end of 2005. According to Reidar Wasenius, product manager at Nokia, the success of visual radio was dependent on both other handset manufacturers and stations adopting the service. Kiss FM in Finland will be the first station to launch the service, when it goes live next month. Discussions with other handset manufacturers were ongoing, Wasenius added. Virgin is currently the most listened to station in Europe and was the first commercial station to be broadcast over the internet there.
(end)
|
|
