Mobile music hit by download cap conundrum

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 27 Jan 2011 at 08:57

A new pay-per-play streaming music service for mobiles is trying to work out how to get around stringent download caps being imposed by network operators.

Psonar is set to launch in the UK next year, and in Ireland and Canada in the next few months, but the company says it is trying to develop ways to overcome the download caps being imposed by mobile phone companies.

“We are targeted at the mobile phone generation who may not have a home computer, might not generally collate music and might see the £120 a year for [premium] Spotify as too expensive,” Martin Rigby, Psonar CEO, told PC Pro. “Downloading tracks costs around 79p from most stores, but this pay-per-play model will be charged at 1p a track.”

However, T-Mobile recently cut mobile 3G downloads for new customers to 500MB per month, which would mean users of a streaming service could breach the cap by listening to only a handful of tracks a day.

“It is an issue and we are looking at three different ways of getting around the problem,” said Rigby.

“We hope that people will be able to use Wi-Fi in a lot of cases, to take the strain, and although it is a streaming service, we are looking to let people choose tracks during the evening or when they are in a Wi-Fi area and listen to them when they are on the move.”

Rigby said Psonar was still assessing how such a system would work, adding that it would depend on the storage capaciy of phones and licensing issues.

A third option, Psonar said, would be a range of bit rates, which would mean users would downgrade the stream at a lower quality to preserve data allowance, but be allowed to listen to the track again at a higher quality when within a Wi-Fi area.