Australian papers dump print for digital
Major Australian media organizations are preparing to begin phasing out newsprint and deliver daily newspapers and magazines over mobile phone networks.
SYDNEY, 17 July 2000 - Organizations such as News Ltd. have been trialing a variety of electronic reader devices including Softbook and senior News Ltd. sources say the company plans to begin phasing out newsprint as early as next year.
The move could see mobile phone company One.Tel replace newsagents as the major distributor of text based news and magazines within five years in both Australia and Europe.
News Ltd. director of new media, Patrice McAree, has confirmed that the company is looking at a variety of methods of electronic delivery and that it plans to use One.Tel, which it is a major investor in, to deliver news content.
News has been working with prototypes of electronic readers, including the California-developed Softbook, that are flexible, lightweight and capable of storing more than 10,000 pages of text and graphics. They also have audio capabilities so users can have the news read to them.
The price of the devices is expected to fall to around US$100 sometime next years and senior sources within News Ltd. say the company has conducted a feasibility study that shows that it could recover the costs of distributing the devices free to all of its newspaper home delivery subscribers within 20 weeks.
Packer, One.Tel connection
Kerry Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd. also
has a major stake in One.Tel and it too wants to use the
telco for content delivery.
One.Tel's joint CEO of new networks Steve Moore said, "we are talking on a regular basis with the guys at News Ltd. and PBL about our strategy and our vision and we are looking at their content and the synergies that can be developed between their organisations and skill sets and our core business.
"Certainly there is the potential for One.Tel to become the newsagent."
But, he said, it could be five years before mass-market devices such as electronic newspapers on flexible plastic sheets were available.
"But in that sort of time frame you can achieve a paradigm shift in the way people interact with their media and entertainment.
"We are true believers in the convergence of the media and the entertainment businesses and that's why our partnership with News and PBL is very exciting.
"We see that as definitely part of the future but there are quite a number of steps before we get to that vision," said Moore.
One.Tel gears up
One.Tel is already well advanced in building a core
infrastructure capable of data delivery to a wide range of
devices and Moore indicated the company favours a
system similar to the highly successful Japanese iMode
system that uses packet-based data over a narrow band
wireless system.
He said the system was designed to be able interface with a range of devices and was flexible enough to be adapted for new devices as they came on the market.
"All of our backbone today is packet-based, all of our billing systems are capable of doing packet-based billing, all of our application architecture is modular so we can plug and play; we have open standards so if some guy invents something tonight in his garage in Berkley and next week it takes off and is the next big thing we can plug and play it on our network.
"The core infrastructure will allow us to easily integrate new applications as we go."
Moore said the company was not convinced that customers were going to want a 2MB air interface offer by third-generation networks.
"If you look at examples around the world such as DoCoMo in Japan, they have an incredibly successful data service that runs at 9600bps and that is fairly graphically rich. It has colour graphics, text and input from the users.
"They have been able to build a very sophisticated service that operates on a very low bandwidth connection, although a packet connection, which is something we don't have today. We are now deploying GPRS (general packet radio service) so we will have that packet-based environment. We are still debating internally just how much bandwidth we are going to offer.
"We don't believe customers are going to want lots of bandwidth on their mobile devices. Customers don't care what the bandwidth is and they don't care whether it is WAP, GPRS, 3G or EDGE. All they care about is whether the service is something they find valuable -- can I get the latest stock report, can I get a video mail, can I do whatever it is that I want to do that will help me and I think is value for money," he said.
