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Sony – UK Needs Better Broadband to Boost UK Music Streaming

Monday, Jun 23rd, 2014 (2:18 pm) - Score 528

Sony’s Director of Digital Sales for Sweden, Jacob Herbst, has said that he expects Internet streaming services (e.g. Spotify, Deezer etc.) to take off in the United Kingdom once broadband infrastructure improves. Funny.. we thought it had already taken off and for a moment needed to check that we weren’t still stuck in 2010 or earlier.

By a curious coincidence Herbst’s remarks just happened to come on the same day that the Official Charts Company announced online music streaming would, effective from July 2014, start counting towards the UK’s singles chart; a very long overdue change that could have a noticeable impact.

In addition, the British Phonographic Industry’s (BPI) annual summary of digital music sales for 2013 shows that streaming is already having quite a big impact (here), growing 33.7% in the last year to account for revenues of £103m and the trend is continuing to get stronger.

Jacob Herbst told the BBC:

I personally believe that the change, or kind of the shift, to streaming will happen [in the United Kingdom] as well. There are several factors that could impact when it happens. I mean we’ve talked about stuff like broadband infrastructure, the access to 3G and 4G, the cost of data on mobile devices etc.”

Admittedly streaming is significantly more prevalent in Sweden where the service provides roughly 75% of the country’s music revenues, which is well below the UK. Naturally Sweden also benefits from a national high-capacity Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) style network, which is well in advance of the UK where copper-based ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) solutions still dominate, although their mobile networks are closer to the UK.

For example, Sweden’s Tele2 will give you 10Mbps on Mobile Broadband with a 15GB allowance for around the equivalent of £17.42 (SIM only), while their 30GB service with speeds of 20Mbps goes for approx. £30.55. Generally that’s not a million miles off the top packages from EE or Three UK’s 4G service etc. The cost of mobile data and spectrum capacity has always been a stumbling block, which often hinders mobile from directly competing with fixed lines.

But is better broadband speed really a critical factor for music streaming? Most music files for a single track of around 3-4 minutes in length will vary in size between 3MB to 10MB (MegaBytes), depending upon content, compression type and audio codec etc. In other words, a high quality track of 10MB in size should be able to stream live over a stable 0.5Mbps (512Kbps) broadband line and, provided you believe Ofcom’s overly optimistic figures (here), close to 100% of the UK should have access to a basic broadband service of that calibre (note: around 8% of the UK are deemed by Ofcom to have sub-2Mbps speeds).

Naturally the estimated capability of a fixed line service often does not reflect reality but it’s perhaps not unfair to say that broadband speed may be less of an issue for streaming adoption, both in terms of fixed line and mobile. Data capacity and service cost are probably more of a stumbling block, especially on some mobile operators. On the other hand a family that only has access to a super-slow line at home and or which multi-tasks different Internet services are still going to struggle.

But broadband availability is improving and by 2017 everybody should have got access to speeds of at least 2Mbps, with 95% hopefully able to receive speeds of greater than 24Mbps.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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