«UBC Media Group plc (“UBC” or “the Company”) has today announced the closure of the loss-making mobile phone version of its Cliq music downloading service and will instead concentrate on providing a business-to-business solution to manufacturers of connected devices, including Wi-Fi digital radios like Imagination Technologies, with whom it has an existing relationship. (...) Commenting on the closure of the Cliq mobile service, Chief Executive Simon Cole said: “I remain convinced that transactional revenues will be an important part of the radio industry in the future. For a variety of reasons, including the delay by manufacturers in bringing DAB connected devices to market, we have tried to lead this process in the interim on the JAVA mobile phone platform and have not succeeded. However, the technology, intellectual property and pending patents that we have developed during this process remain within the business. We believe we can exploit these without the need for the high risk, high cost exposure to a consumer service “»
«A “BUY” button on a car or kitchen radio would be a much bigger proposition. Much more listening takes place on these, leading to more purchases… But these devices, to date, haven’t been equiped to communicate with music stores online. This is what UBC will be working on in future, it seems. On PCs the biggest problem is the competition from “free”. On mobile phones you’ve got DRM issues and data transfer costs. UBC could have hung on until they'd sorted out DRM-free deals with the majors, and Virgin Media had threatened illegal downloaders to within an inch of their second-lives... but hanging on costs money.» (Cliq - R.I.P.)
«Sorry to hear UBC have shut-down their mobile phone music download service Cliq. I believe Simon, Pascal and the guys at UBC have the right idea but perhaps they’re pursuing it on the wrong platform. Yes mobile phones are ubiquitous but they are essentially communication devices. You’ll use your phone to take some pictures or listen to some music but it’s dominant use is to communicate with phone calls and text. RAJAR shows the amount of people who have ever listened to radio on a mobile phone is just over 10%. They don’t break out how many people have done so in the past week. They don’t include mobile phone usage in digital listening weekly reach. They probably don’t like having to compute really small numbers! Radio on the other hand is specifically a media consumption device. Better yet, it’s an audio media consumption device. If we could work a way of people consuming even more audio using their radio, be that buying music or otherwise, the relevancy of the device and the data transmission capabilities of DAB are a perfect marriage. Think about it.»
«The fact that the music was encrypted with DRM, meaning that I had a limited number of devices to playback the music was the main reason, but the £1.25 price point is unattractive when iTunes is selling the same songs for 79p. That's a 58% premium! I believe that un-encrypted downloads are the only longterm solution that's going to be accepted by the public. We're already seeing that with iTunes beginning to unlock some of its inventory. Play.com is already up and running selling mp3s in the UK, with EMI the first of the big four record companies working with them. Amazon has announced it'll be selling downloads later this year, and it'll undoubtedly have done deals with all the majors, and Napster in the US has gone down the mp3 route for its sold tracks (subscriptions obviously work differently).»
«Cliq was originally a service using DAB data to let you buy any song you heard on any participating radio station. It was rather clever, though for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to earn any money out of it. Then, it became a service using a Java client for mobile phones, again, allowing you to download any song you heard on a participating radio station. This was rather clever too: less technically clever than the DAB version, but slightly easier to earn revenue from. UBC have called it a day, pulled the plug, and Cliq will henceforth be a business-to-business service for broadcasters and manufacturers alike. (...) There is clearly a market for something that, when you hit a button, buys the song you’re listening to. Radio remains the main way that people discover new music; it’s only natural that it retails it.»
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