ZEDRAY

A leading network operator is effectively giving away ring tone content from their website. It seems that no effort has been made to hide the location of the source MP3 file when previewing ring tones for sale on their website. Hence they are giving away their product – i.e. free beer.

Hiding an audio source file can be done thorough a dynamic flash movie, that would at least make it ‘difficult’ to recover the source file intact.

How to
Click to preview a ring tone and it will open up into a new window. Ignore the flash animation as it has nothing to do with the audio.

View source (this will depend on your browser)

The source MP3 files are shown as plane text in the source code, hence you can copy the .mp3 link straight out of the code.

Paste the link it into the URL bar of your browser and save the download.

Free ring tone.

Problem A catch you say?
Now we need to get the MP3 file onto the phone. I plan to upload the files using a Bluetooth stick, Nokia 6600 connection suite and Intuwave m-Router software (as the connection suite can’t find a Bluetooth connection by itself). The connection suite will automatically convert to the file into WAV format as the phone doesn’t support MP3.

Somewhat complicated you say? That two euros fifty for an (supposedly hassle free) over-the-air-deployment is starting to look a little cheep?

Now for the connectivity issues (all off the top of my head):

• Bluetooth is becoming popular, gaining wide hardware and software support across the industry. However it is still unreliable (service will depend on the device, firmware and installed drivers) and in my experience most users will be disappointed when they can’t connect two devices and never find out why.
• Infra red – I still haven’t managed to get my computer to send a file via infrared. This feature seems to be becoming LESS popular as time goes bye. Even though the technology is cheep to implement, low power, simple to use, slightly more reliable than Bluetooth (when in line of sight) it seems to be on the way out. Go figure?
• Hot syncing from a drop in charger/interface - nice feature of the high end ‘smart phones’. Quality of the implementations vary depending on the manufacturer.
• Flashcards, the readers are popular (booths are appearing in shops for file printing) but this method of delivery is not well supported. I.e. you have to copy the audio file into the ‘media directory’ on the phone before it will be detected by the ring tone chooser interface. Most of the older readers I’ve used couldn’t write to my Nokia SD card.
• Most handsets don’t come with USB/COMM cables. Cables are easy to use (once you’ve installed the drivers) but they are proprietary (one cable for each type of phone) and I’ve only seen these for certain phones in development environments.
• Over the air – Which brings me back to square one.

Conclusion
I was surprised at how easy it was to obtain valued content off a commercial website without paying for it or having its quality reduced somehow (e.g. having to re-encode the audio). However, considering the nature of the content it would have been just as easy to rip the content of an original audio CD.

Note: A consultant once boasted to me that the music industry now makes more money from ring tones as it does from single sales.

With this experience, it would seem that the whole ring tone industry business model is based on the POOR STATE of handset connectivity.

I.e. In a normal world, better media sharing technology would force providers to innovate their content (mobile flash, Java games, more advanced services) or risk becoming obsolete. However I predict connectivity issues will only get worse as network operators sell locked down phones (disabled features) and introduce more advanced digital rights management (DRM) solutions. This will reduce interoperability (even more) as network operators clearly have a cash incentive to promote over-the-air-provision, as delivery is with their bandwidth (SMS, GPRS, 3G) and they can more easily make themselves part of the payment chain (premium SMS).

Opps
USB ports are broken, so I need a new laptop and can’t be bothered to install all this connectivity software onto another computer. You win this time content providers! [Shakes fist]

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.