Right product, wrong market?

I’m a bit of a radio junkie – and a speech radio junkie at that. I think I mentioned here a couple of years ago that I once found myself on my way out for the evening in Singapore listening on the bus on my walkman to a 30 minute documentary about the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel (as you can imagine I am a whizz at parties). So you can see how deep my affliction is…

As you can imagine, one of the main uses to which I put my broadband connection at home (and sometimes at work) is the Internet feed from BBC radio. It’s really cool to be able to listen to British radio. But the disadvantage is that it’s restricted to the computer speakers. Which means no listening in bed, in the bath or in the kitchen – three of the places that for me, are the best places to listen to the radio.

Which is where the BT Voyager Digital media player comes in. It’s connected to your computer by means of a short range FM connection (the sort you use with wireless headphones), and it means you can play your Internet radio (and your MP3s and CDs) in any room in the house. Fantastic! So now I have radio all over the house.

It has its problems: first of all it’s a bugger to set up radio stations that aren’t specifically linked to it on the web. You have to find out the stream url – and the BBC in particular seem very cagey about giving them out, hiding them behind all sorts of evil scripts and stuff that a fumbling amateur like me has no chance of cracking.

It took me a day and a half to crack it, but google is, as always, your friend. By downloading some very dodgy application I managed to work out the url of the Radio Five Live stream (it’s http://wmlive.bbc.net.uk/wms/radio5/5Live_int_s1?MSWMExt=.asf if you’re interested) – just at the point that Samantha was about to start screaming at me (when I have a problem like this I can be more than a little obsessive).

So now I have everything I need, and I can listen to the radio in the bath. It's fantastic. But the fact I got this thing for £100 instead of the advertised price of £160 (which sounds very much like a stock clearance to me) set me wondering. I mean, if you’re in the market for UK digital radio stations in the UK, you’d buy a DAB radio, right? You get excellent quality audio without it having to be tethered (however loosely) to a computer, there’s no fannying around with the buffering delays that make Internet radio sometimes a bit hit and miss – and there’s no problem with the Internet rights that mean I have to get my live football scores off the BBC website on a Saturday rather than on the radio. And since a DAB radio costs about £70, the maths alone tell you why this product is being so heavily discounted. Who, exactly, is going to buy it?

The answer is – people like me. Instead of trying to sell it to people in the UK to listen to British radio stations, they should be selling it to expats. There are huge numbers of Australians, Kiwis, Americans, French, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and a whole lot more in the UK that would love to listen to radio from home, and who would love the flexibility of this Internet radio as much as I do.

So all BT have to do is advertise it to them. There are lots of ways of reaching expats. Here in Paris, for example, there’s an Anglophone magazine called FUSAC – and I bet equivalents exist for various communities in London. You can deploy banners on expat websites and - thanks to IP address identification you could advertise on foreign websites being accessed from the UK. So you could advertise it right on the sites of the radio stations these expats are listening to. I’m convinced that this is the market for this product, but I wonder if BT is?