Matt Kapko

RCR Wireless News
Television just isn’t the same these days. The writers’ strike in Hollywood, now in its ninth week, has given millions another reason to turn off the tube. Unless reruns and reality TV are your thing, the TV set has essentially become a content wasteland where late night and scripted TV shows are nearly absent altogether (well, except for sports programming).

It’s too soon to determine how the strike will affect the momentum wireless carriers and content providers are experiencing with the growth of mobile TV services. But the Writers Guild of America argues it is fighting for big stakes in the emerging new media space. That umbrella term for the newest forms of distribution, including mobile TV services, is the name of the game—and largely considered the future—for TV, and writers understandably want to secure their slice of that action going forward.

Impact on mobile TV

It’s difficult to argue that the dispute between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is having no impact on mobile television. While most mobile TV service providers and networks either decline to comment or brush the strike aside as a minor nuisance, those in the industry who don’t get their paychecks from a major entertainment company see things somewhat differently. But, it’s not all crash and burn either. The impact is nuanced and relatively unnoticed by most.

“In the sense that mobile television content is re-purposed, yes, there will be some impact,” said Karen Allen, general manager of Mobile Entertainment Forum Americas. Indeed, she believes most viewers that get fed up with the lack of content on TV will turn to the Internet first, primarily because it’s more in sync with their existing behavior.

As for mobile becoming an alternative platform for those viewers, the medium is clearly waiting for them with open arms. Overall, Allen estimates that around 1 million users are being added to mobile video services each month. “We are seeing great increases in all of that,” she said. Still, she believes there are enough mobile content providers to fill the slots for the likes of MediaFLO USA Inc., MobiTV Inc. and GoTV Networks Inc.

Adoption numbers could increase substantially if a mobile video superstar were to emerge during the strike, she said. Little else could generate so much fanfare and drive newfound interest in the medium, she added.

The latest numbers from M:Metrics Inc. indicate that for the three-month average ending in October, 3.2 million subscribers watched program video while 1.6 million watched broadcast video.

“(The strike) is of tertiary consequence when it comes to mobile video,” said Kanishka Agarwal, VP of mobile media at Nielsen Mobile. “Mobile video is seeing pretty rapid growth. The key thing that’s keeping it from being a mass phenomenon at this point is price.”

Following price would be the quality of service, and finally after that, comes programming and content, Agarwal added. On mobile, people are really expecting to see an extension of the programs they already watch at home anyway, Agarwal said. With choices diminished at home, few consumers would be surprised to find the same gaps in programming on their mobile phones.

Writers’ perspective

“Our goal is to facilitate the work of our members being available to all platforms. The writers guild is platform agnostic,” Charles Slocum, assistant executive director at WGA, said in an interview with RCR Wireless News.

“We look at mobile as a place where people can get a start that couldn’t find a path on traditional media,” he said. Calling the mobile platform a “little more nimble, open to experimentation,” Slocum said he expects it to be “fertile ground for developing new talent.”

One of the major issues in the WGA’s proposals is to secure writers’ stakes in their talent if and when it makes its way onto a platform it wasn’t originally created for. “We believe that those provisions are very important for creators,” Slocum added.

The deals in mobile “tend to be more favorable to the creative talent because the creative talent is more likely to own the rights to that talent,” Slocum said.

The numbers

The WGA is seeking to increase its residual structure for all content, regardless of the platform, to 2.5% of revenues. Furthermore, the guild doesn’t care if the content is ad-supported or paid for by consumers.

“The official view of the guild is we don’t care,” Slocum said. “Our goal is to have consistent provisions that pay the writer the same way, regardless of whether the consumer pays or if an advertiser pays.” Although the WGA believes its current contract already covers payment for ad-supported content, the reality is that most studios and networks are not paying those fees. Some are, but most aren’t, Slocum said.

As it stands now, content purchased by consumers for short-term use brings the guild 1.2% of revenues while content purchased for long-term use carries a guild fee of .35% of revenues, according to a recent report from Bear, Sterns and Co. Inc. The guild is seeking to increase all residuals to 2.5% of revenues, regardless of who pays for it and where it’s used. “We want to simplify the contract,” Slocum added.

During the latest negotiations, which broke down Dec. 7, the AMPTP offered the WGA a one-time 0 flat fee for unlimited streaming over the course of a year, following a six-week window of free streaming. Additionally, AMPTP offered to continue the current residual structure for paid content.

The WGA’s complete proposal to the AMPTP amounts to 1 million over the next three years, Bear, Stearns calculated. At least 81% of that comes from “non-traditional” re-use, it added.

“The delta between what the writers are asking for and what the studios are offering is a maximum about 0 million, despite reports that the two sides are roughly million apart,” the firm concluded in its report. “From Wall Street’s perspective, we estimate the impact of accepting the WGA’s proposal is largely negligible.”

The firm estimates that the 0 million figure would impact less than 1% of annual earnings for the media companies. Many industry watchers have noted that the studios are likely most concerned about setting a precedent in new-media revenue sharing. The Directors Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild both have contract negotiations coming up in 2008, and you can bet they’ll be looking for similar concessions from the AMPTP.

However, with no end in sight for the strike, networks have begun to suffer major financial drawbacks. Earlier this month, networks began reimbursing advertisers after failing to reach required ratings before the year’s end.

Fresh ideas emerge

With so much uncertainty in the air, some film and TV writers are now negotiating with venture capitalists and other investors to develop their own Web-based distribution channels while completely bypassing the Hollywood studio system. Some expect new companies to be formed in the coming months that could include everything from privately owned studios to new distribution channels.

Still, other deals are being reached in Hollywood that could very well put more pressure on the WGA to scale back on its demands. Most of the late-night TV shows are expected to go back on air next week without writers while David Letterman’s production studio is holding standalone talks with its writing staff to strike their own deal for a return with writers in tow.

The decision to come back without writers has clearly not been easy. When Comedy Central announced that “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” would be back on air Jan. 7, the two issued a brief statement that made hay out of an otherwise woeful situation: “We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.”

Since writers walked off their jobs Nov. 5, more than 10,000 people have been out of work.

RCR Wireless News
It’s hard to imagine, but people are more connected to their television than ever before. Countless TV shows have adopted participation characteristics that make fans interaction with their favorite shows all the more possible — if they so desire.

Premium SMS doesn’t comprise the bulk of these interactions, but it is growing year over year and the companies that manage these transactions are seeing their businesses grow like gangbusters.

“Mobile drives other interactions — initially, with ‘American Idol,’ the toll-free call-ins were the driver,” Telescope Inc. CEO Troy Sample said. “Without the AT&T sponsorship, there was no season two for ‘Idol,’ — it was that simple. Toll-free led the way there for the audience participation. Subsequently, SMS has provided the sizzle and we’ll see this for a range of cross-media applications. We have seen this with year-on-year growth for the SMS interactions; high double-digit growth that is approaching triple-digit growth for SMS for ‘Idol,’ and this is reflecting itself in the broader participation TV market as well.”

New ways to participate

Telescope, which manages the interactive voting components of “American Idol,” managed about 750 million interactions during the first three quarters of 2007 with about 100 million of those initiated by SMS on mobile phones, according to Sample.

“We view premium SMS as one aspect of participation media, one tool that is available to the media partners to utilize,” Sample said. “We launched here in 2002 … and people didn’t know what text-messaging was. In fact, in the first season of ‘American Idol’ there wasn’t even text-messaging at all.”

Premium competition

Sample said Telescope manages more shows than any other company, but they clearly have a major competitor in the interactive TV space, specifically transactions done via premium SMS.

SinglePoint, which focuses primarily on SMS and mobile transactions, said it processed 35 million text-message transactions on interactive TV shows during the third quarter of the year. This out of a total of more than 52 million transactions made by text messages throughout the quarter, according to the company and a report it cited from Nielsen Mobile.

“We’ve been in interactive television really for well over a year and a half. We have put capable and reliable infrastructure behind our interactive television efforts, and what that translates to is a level of assurance for our ITV customers, broadcasters and the studios that is hard to find among our competition,” said Doug Busk, VP of industry relations at SinglePoint, which competes against Telescope and a number of other vendors in the space.

“We’re excited that the level of activity that we’re seeing is being recognized in Nielsen’s report,” said Busk.

Declining to arm wrestle over claims to the highest market share in this fast-changing space, Sample would only say that “SinglePoint and Telescope are leaders in this particular segment.” In fact, Telescope uses Singlepoint for some of its “American Idol” applications, Sample said.

One clear differentiator between the companies, however, is the fact that Telescope likes to call this space “participation TV” while SinglePoint fancies “interactive TV” instead. The Mobile Marketing Association prefers “participation TV,” but nonetheless it makes for fun discussion between all the parties.

Runway to Beltway

SinglePoint, like Telescope, has inked deals with top entertainment media companies. Indeed, the company is currently working on numerous campaigns with the Bravo network, particularly the SMS offerings tied to the station’s hit show, “Project Runway.”

“Viewers can not only act as voters in the winners of the show, which model is going to be best, but they’re picking which haircut is going to be next, they’re picking which stylist is going to be superior, so it’s bringing the viewer that much closer to the television experience,” Busk said.

SinglePoint has also been heavily involved in Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as he tries to reach supporters through SinglePoint’s text-messaging platform.

“We’re talking, you know, tremendous participation by the audience, and I think a fine example of how politics is going to leverage this medium, as it has others before it like TV, radio and online to drive interaction, to drive loyalty. And nowhere does loyalty matter more and personal experience matter more than politics,” Busk said.

“We’ve seen the number of formats in terms of participation TV continue to grow,” Sample added.

TV show producers are getting more innovative with their campaigns, he said. “I think all good interactivity is built on the producers of the show.”

“I don’t think any producer comes and says ‘let’s do premium SMS,’ ” Sample said. “They say, ‘We want to see more interactivity with our programs.’ ” If it’s not built into the show, it doesn’t work well, he added. Telescope offers a range of participation media tools that it can employ to work best with whatever each show’s format is trying to do, Sample continued.

“We are a multi-channel participation media company,” he said. “If you’re a premium SMS company and that’s all you have to offer that might work in niche programming.”

Looking ahead to next year, Sample sees more branded entertainment deals coming into the space. “I think it’s the growth possibilities and innovations that interest the brands,” he said.

RCR Wireless News
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands—There’s always a first shot at everything; first to the moon, first to summit Mount Everest, first to end homelessness. It may not be as altruistic as the latter, but Universal Music Group International and Nokia Corp. now have the distinction of being the first companies in their respective industries to map out a model for free access to music.

Earlier this month, the world’s largest mobile phone company and the world’s largest music company announced “Comes with Music,” a service that gives Nokia device owners free access to Universal Music’s entire catalog of 2 million tracks. There are plenty of caveats surrounding the deal, as with anything precluded by “free,” but the price consumers pay for their compatible Nokia devices will include the licensing costs associated with access to that music for one year.

“All music to everybody, anywhere, all the time. That’s been the quest for music service for Nokia,” Anssi Vanjoki, executive VP and GM of multimedia for Nokia, said in his opening keynote address at Nokia World. “This is not a streaming service, but all the songs and albums are there for you to own and keep.”

Once the stars are aligned—specifically if a consumer lives in a region where the service is available and owns a compatible device—music lovers will have access to as many tracks as their ears can handle.

Once the 12 months are up, the consumer can purchase a new device and with it comes another license for 12 months of use. Regardless, whatever music the user downloads within that 12-month period is theirs to keep forever, whether it be on a memory card inside their device or a PC, which users will be allowed to transfer their downloads to for further use.

Nokia’s music store is only available in the United Kingdom at the moment, but the Finnish company says it’s planning an aggressive rollout that will bring the service to users across the globe as soon as possible.

“There is no comparable service where the music can be kept by the consumers, even if their subscription lapses,” Universal Music Chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge told a perplexed audience.

“It’s certainly a ground-breaking moment for Universal Music,” he said.

“We believe that mobile is inevitably one of the keys to our future growth,” Grainge said. “Music on the move is what people want. No one stands still anymore.”

Clear proposition

Ted Cohen, chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum Americas and a veteran in the music industry, believes the deal instantly becomes the leading model for music in mobile. “I think that the ability to get unlimited access to music while you’re on the go is a much better proposition than an a la carte model,” he said in an interview with RCR Wireless News.

“You want what you want at your finger tips and your mobile phone is there 24/7. It’s a great reason to decide on a Nokia device over a Samsung or an LG or a Motorola. So as much become more important on the go, it’s a deal-closer,” he said.

The tracks downloaded from Comes with Music will be locked by digital rights management and won’t allow users to burn tracks to a CD unless an upgrade of some sort is purchased. Nokia and Universal Music have been tight-lipped about the minutiae since the deal was announced, but Cohen says most consumers could care less.

“If you’re getting the music, you know, if it feels like it’s free and there’s some service charges for services outside of access … that transcends access into ownership,” Cohen said.

“One is ephemeral access and the other is tangible ownership,” he said. “If I can access anything I want, I don’t want to own it. I would trade the square footage that’s being taken up by CD cabinets right now (Cohen has a collection of more than 6,000 CDs) for access to all that and more.”

When it comes down to it, music can still be appreciated and the artists, producers, record labels and everyone else in the food chain get paid, he continued.

There will always be albums that hardcore fans are going to want to “own and hold close,” Cohen said, but that doesn’t negate the 20% drop in CD sales that the industry is experiencing year over year.

Recurring revenue stream

“It’s not a devaluation of music, it’s a revaluation,” he said. The entire industry stands to profit much more if it can convince most music fans to pay even as little as to a month for access to music rather than relying on the everdepleting few who still buy CDs. “It’s not the same per user, but it’s never going to be,” he added.

“In a model like Nokia and Universal Music Group have come up with, it’s a recurring revenue scheme,” Cohen said. “The music labels have never had a recurring revenue scheme.”

Back at Nokia World, Rob Wells, senior VP of Universal Music’s digital business, tried to elaborate and fill in some of the blanks on this first-of-its-kind deal.

“Music is probably the most evocative art form,” he began. “It’s very unlikely that there’s anyone on the planet that can actually claim to hate music.”

The problem is “not everybody loves to pay for it,” he continued. “Piracy is the single biggest factor in the decline of music sales over the last 10 years.”

But digital sales are helping to ebb that flow. In 2005, digital music accounted for 3% of overall music business sales, a number that in 2006 jumped to at least 7%. For 2007, forecasts are putting the number closer to 14%, Wells said.

“We’ve made history today,” he said. “I believe definitely the digital music industry will never be the same again.”

He reminded attendees that the label and its artists will continue to get their share. “The building blocks of our industry remain unchanged,” Wells said. “Our revenues will come from the sale of the device.”

This despite the fact that there will be no download limits over the 12-month period. However, Wells pointed out that the 2 million tracks currently available on the service would take at least five years to download and more than four years to listen to in their entirety.

“There is no catch,” Wells said. “The concept of ownership disappears. Consumers will naturally gravitate towards this model and away from the pay-per-track model.”

Ed Averdieck, who runs Nokia’s music business, told RCR Wireless News that the announcement is the latest shift in a years-long strategy undertaken by Nokia.

First it embedded music players in most of its devices, then it enabled consumers to purchase music directly on their device—and now it has closed the loop on what consumers’ really want: Music for close to free.

Because of that, Nokia decidedly went against developing business models that would require consumers to pay for a subscription service after 12 months. It would rather drive users back to the store to purchase a new device.

“We want to create a sustainable business,” Averdieck said. Indeed, it’s arguable that no other service could possibly draw people into buying a new device after 12 months in as compelling a fashion.

“We want this to be as simple as possible,” he said.

“This is a good way of re-engaging them in the music business,” Averdieck said of the millions of young music fans that haven’t purchased an album for years.

Nokia’s Comes with Music service is currently compatible with its N81, N82 and the N95 8GB models. All future N-Series devices coming down the pike will be compatible as well.

Nokia says it’s also in serious discussions with the other major music labels and plans to expand the magnitude of the offering for many years to come.

RCR Wireless News
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands—Nokia Corp.’s strategy hasn’t wavered much in the past few years and the message for 2008 is essentially more of the same. While at one end of the spectrum, the Finnish company is eyeing more feature-rich devices and applications that connect peoples’ “digital lives,” it is also committed to widening its global reach by re-doubling its efforts in emerging markets such as India, China, Ukraine and the African continent, top executive told an audience of 3,000 at the opening of Nokia World.

Despite the significant push Nokia has made in the realm of converged services and multimedia, “the device itself remains the core of our business,” President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in his opening keynote. “We continue to be a device company. On top of that we are going to take the services opportunity.”

Nokia enjoys the largest market share in the industry because of the breadth of its portfolio, Kallasvuo said. “Our industry is pushing the boundaries of creativity, technology and innovations. Consumers increasingly expect Internet access to be as natural as talking or texting on their phones.”

Nokia recognizes that desire and plans to continue developing devices and applications that quench that thirst for an all-in-one world in pocket-sized form, Kallasvuo added.

“We know that things need to be improved,” Executive VP and GM of Multimedia Anssi Vanjoki told the audience.

Reshaping communications

Nokia has its sights set on an all-out revision of communications, entertainment and how we connect with the world beyond our daily lives, he said. Vanjoki aired a video clip aimed at defining what Nokia envisions for the future. As the clip went through the motions of more than 100 years of history, it highlighted the various introductions of screens along the way and the changes each has brought to the cultural landscape of humanity. Eventually, “everything came to us in a device that could fit in our pocket,” the narrator said. “We shared what inspired us with everyone that we cared about … our sense of purpose kept growing,” he continued. “It was the beginning of everything. Welcome to the fourth screen.”

U.S. strategy

The device to connect people, of course, is the mobile phone. To that end, Nokia’s head of mobile phones, Kai Oistamo, sees music, navigation and gaming as the three most important areas for the company. In each area, Nokia has to collaborate with the best minds and find ways to add value to the consumer to make any dent in overall adoption, Oistamo said.

Moreover, he says the company is committed to regaining market share in the United States. Calling its business in the United States “very important,” Oistamo recognizes that “you cannot overlook the market structure.”

While Nokia has opened flagship stores in New York City and Chicago and plans to open more where it will offer devices free of carrier control and unlocked for use on any compatible network (albeit at a much higher, unsubsidized price), Oistamo said that is not Nokia’s end game for the market here.

“You have to earn your mark in a marketplace everyday,” he said.

He says Nokia recognizes the importance of working with carriers in the U.S. market and says “that’s exactly what we are doing.” The company changed its strategy for the United States mid-2006 and has put considerable focus on CDMA devices for Verizon Wireless and is refocusing on its relationship with AT&T Mobility, Oistamo said. He added, however, that it typically takes 18 to 24 months to develop and bring new products to the marketplace.

More generally, Oistamo admitted that the rapid success of Apple Inc.’s iPhone was a “wake-up call for the whole industry,” particularly with regard to its innovative use of a touchscreen and intuitive user interface. While touchscreens have been around for years, a new entrant came to the market and beat everyone at their own game when it came to the user friendly interface that Apple developed for the iPhone. He added that it was partly a failure on the part of the whole industry to not effectively market the true power of next-generation Internet browsers available pre-iPhone days, but he admitted that more needs to be done on that front.

Oistamo also talked about Nokia’s plans in the navigation sector; especially with its pending $8.1 billion purchase of digital mapping company Navteq appearing set to close. Oistamo said he expects the deal to close in the next few months, but regardless sees navigation as a “unique opportunity” for the mobile juggernaut.

Navigation can deliver completely new types of user experiences on mobile devices by combining navigation features with cellular connectivity, he said, adding that the experience is so much worse without that tie-in. “I think there’s lots of innovation that one can do in this area,” he said. “Why would anyone want a standalone navigation device?”

Emerging markets

Overall, Nokia wants to push its high-end N-Series devices and lower-end handsets equally, Oistamo said. The company determines its focus in each market dependant on the overall needs of the people living there, he added.

Soren Petersen, who heads up Nokia’s mobile phones division aimed at delivering devices well below $100, understands this equation all too well. He’s constantly studying how to better meet the consumers’ needs in emerging markets.

The way Nokia brings prices down in these areas is through sheer scale and a determined decision to bring the cost down at retail. Petersen has a “maverick role within the company,” where he’s often found himself arguing with multiple divisions for sweeping changes that all drive costs to the consumer down in the end, he said.

“Rather to do it ourselves than let someone else do it to us,” he explained. Petersen has convinced many within the company that Nokia can make as much money as its competitors without charging more than $72 per device. He argues with colleagues a lot less these days, he told RCR Wireless News.

Many of his ideas have come from personal journeys to places far off the map. On a visit to Kenya, Petersen stopped in an “excessively rural storefront” and noticed all of the products were displayed in plastic bags. When he asked the merchant where the boxes and manuals had gone, the man replied “make good fire.”

It was then that Petersen realized Nokia needed to change its approach to packaging. “Make it barely last the journey,” Petersen explained. By cutting back on the box size and constructing them from reusable materials, Nokia is saving about $147 million each year. “The numbers there alone lit up a whole new drive within the business for these kind of things,” he said.

And what about the user guides? Nokia did away with color printing on the front and back covers and is saving million a year, Petersen said. “It’s scale where one cent is a million dollars.”

Petersen says the company still has one to two years to go on these types of cost-cutting measures. “It’s been a fun process,” he said.

Nokia has introduced new features that have made devices more useful for the people in these markets. For example, Petersen recognized that not only do many of his customers spend a significant portion of their salary on one device, but many of them will never know how to read or write. So what good is a text-based address book to them? It seems simple and rather mundane, but the introduction of icons in the address book has helped countless customers identify loved ones and friends with simple pictures like a soccer ball or flower, he said. Additionally, Nokia added several phonebooks to their devices, recognizing the fact that many people share their phone with a half-dozen others.

The entry-level business comprises half of the company’s overall business now; 150 million units were shipped to emerging markets last year, Petersen said. Two years ago, one out of every 10 Nokia devices sold were entry level. Today, that number is closer to one in five.

RCR Wireless News
Application: PhoneCasting

Running on: Nokia 6555 on AT&T Mobility

Yay: PhoneCasting is a rather innovative approach to broadcasting that enables users to listen to a variety of podcasts and phonecasts via the Internet or on their phone. Better yet, if you’ve always wanted your own radio show of sorts, PhoneCasting allows you to create your own right from your cellphone.

Nay: It was near impossible to find programming that interested me, but that’s not to say the bottomless pit of niche content available wouldn’t captivate someone out there.

We say: Traditional radio sucks so bad these days, it’s a shame most radio stations are even wasting the spectrum to fill our heads with the junk they broadcast. There are always exceptions to the rule—like any station that plays jazz or re-broadcasts NPR or BBC—but there’s still plenty of voids to fill. Enter: Phonecasting.

The real beauty of PhoneCasting is that it gives the listener (any listener) the power to create his or her own show. The problem with that, of course, is there are legions of people with too much time on their hands and not enough editors to keep them on point and interesting.

PhoneCasting is a world without editors, sheer anarchy on the airwaves, and there’s something beautiful about that. However, after perusing PhoneCasting’s programming for a few hours, I’ve decided (much to the chagrin of my anarchist tendencies) that yes, we do need experts and program managers to help us wade through the nonsense.

I did listen to a few interesting podcasts on PhoneCasting. It was pretty easy to dial in. Users can visit www.PhoneCasting.com, and peruse a menu of audio categories including “arts,” “biography” and “technology.” Selecting a particular show allows a user to either listen to the program online or call a phone number to listen to the program using a phone. Each show has a unique phone number assigned to it that simply allows a caller from any phone to dial a phone number and immediately begin listening.

I listened to a 30-minute interview with AT&T Inc. Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson. The interview was actually pretty good. Stephenson talked about the steady build up that brought AT&T to its current position today, evolving from a “subscale wireless business” into the No. 1 wireless service in the country.

Then I listened to a crazy, funky show called “Strange Music in Small Doses.” I’ve never liked the idea of describing music with words, and I’m not about to start now. So I’ll just use the short, self-description I found on PhoneCasting: “Inkxpotter hosts a three cut collision to the avant extremes of sound.”

Lastly, I found a plethora of programming from NPR. I decided to phone in and listen to “World Story of the Day.” Now, this is something I could listen to regularly. NPR’s foreign desk picks the top stories from all of the station’s international coverage.

While technology has unearthed the potential for more civic participation (and who wouldn’t support that?), it has also filled our universe with more crap than we could ever possibly read or listen to. Everyone is a writer/producer/director, and I’m not sure the world is a greater place because of it.

Still, I like PhoneCasting. I like what it’s trying to do. I’ve always dreamed of having my own radio show and opening it with “Liberation Frequency” by Refused. PhoneCasting makes that dream possible. So, without further ado, I give you the first eight lines of one of the greatest songs of all time:

It’s coming through the air

We want all the time all of the time