Rings of Change
I was waiting for the family on Saturday and had a few minutes to fill in, so I fired up Vodafone Live! to see what was there. Dr Who content caught my eye and I discovered that I could download a “Meet the Daleks” video and the Dr Who theme music as a ringtone. However I had the choice of realtone or sommat else that meant nothing to me. How are users supposed to know this?
I tried to download the realtone for £2. I played it and it was unrecognisable. Out of curiosity I downloaded the other version (another £2) and it sounded like a Bontempi organ playing something that could occasionally have been mistaken for the Dr Who music. Neither met my standards. So I tried downloading “Meet the Daleks” for £1.50. It turned out to be a rather stupid interview with members of a club that build Daleks. Ok, so that’s a fine hobby, but it was not BBC content and it was not a particularly well run interview.
So there I was, £5.50 down in under five minutes. It then dawned on me that the target audience for this material doesn’t earn that much in an hour! If I was on the minimum wage and had paid that out, I’d be really annoyed.
Sometime later when I went back to the content I found that the realtone MP3 file wouldn’t play properly, nor would the video. Even later, after switching my phone off and on again, the content I had just paid out so for much for had gone. Vanished. Not a trace. I can’t say I was sad, but I could imagine what a teenager would be like after splashing out all that money. Livid. I could imagine anguished cries of “Daddy - my content has just vanished, can you get it back?” Well, for once I couldn’t.
Searching for it I chanced upon an MP3 file I had downloaded last year and decided to play it. It wouldn’t. “Not Authorized” it said, despite the fact I had made a bonefide download of it from Vodafone.
Not good. Really not good. It’s amazing the markets have grown to the size they have, considering how flakey it all is.
