The following phrase will elicit many of you to wonder how many black cats I used to break a mirror; the rest of you will be wishing me the best of luck with an envious look of wanting to be here with me.
I'm currently at the Eurovision Song Contest.
Now if we were to take a poll, the majority of those in the first camp will be British, and the latter Europeans. The rest of you are wondering what the heck this Song Contest is. Suffice to say it's three live concerts, with national singers from 42 countries, with a worldwide audience larger than the US Superbowl. Many people (and one or two countries - ahem the United Kingdom) have a love/hate relationship with the contest.
Anyway, I digress. With the focus of the contest being music, and growing realisation that mobile media is where the action is, I wondered just how accessible the Grand Prix of Europe is for someone with a smartphone who wants to stay 'within the rules' and not head out to the dark corners of the internet.
First up, and most obviously, is how to get the music. Time to power up the Nokia Music Store and search for Eurovision. Well, that didn't take long, there's the album, sitting happily in the UK store for £12, alongside the releases from some of the artists performing here. A few clicks (assuming you have your store account set up, otherwise there are one or two more hoops to get items like payment details) and you've got the Eurovision music on your phone.
For all that Comes with Music and the plans for Nokia's Music Store come in for microscopic analysis on-line, this is how it's meant to work. Think of something you want to listen to, switch on phone, grab the music, and go.
By design, this will tie you into Windows Media Audio and Microsoft's DRM system. To be honest, I don't think this would be a huge deal to anyone except the die hard geeks (nod your head here, Steve) but there is an alternative – the official Eurovision site (www.eurovision.tv) is an award winning demonstration of what you can do with a web site. Through its online store, every track is available as a DRM-free MP3 download, either as a fixed price per track (99 eurocents) or the full album for 9.99 Euros for all of this year's Double CD of songs.
There's even, and I'd sit down for this, 'karaoke versions' of all the songs so you can sing along at home and imagine yourself in the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. Unfortunately, my E75 struggles with their web store coding so if I wanted to go down this route, then I would need to fall back to a desktop computer.
So if you want the audio, then that's not a problem. How about some video?
Well the Eurovision web team actually come up trumps here, as they have their own YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/eurovision) that has the official music video of each country's song, as well as highlights from all the rehearsals of the stage shows, including interviews and the stage presentations.
These are comfortably watchable in the web browser, and are also available through YouTube Mobile under the Video service icon.
Unfortunately, the biggest media item – the Song Contest itself – isn't something you can pick up with your handset. The streaming is done over P2P using a service called Octoshape and its plug-in is only available for Windows and Macintosh. S60 is out of luck, although I'll say now that any self respecting Eurovision fan will have the dates, memories and their party organised, so this might not be a huge loss to the Europhile.
Of course there are online communities that have grown up around the contest, so there are many RSS feeds that can be piped into your web browser, and sites bookmarked to get the latest news – I'll point out www.esctoday.com as one of the best sources out there, not least because their ten strong team of reporters are doing sterling work around the stadium.
And if you're looking for what people are talking about, as opposed to all us writers, then you might like to watch Twitter, and the hashtag of #eurovision – expect this to explode during the live shows on May 12, 14 and 16 - so the search facility on twitter clients like Gravity will be an alternative source of a textual fan based commentary.
What's nice about the Eurovision organisers is that they know there is a voracious appetite out there for everything to do with the contest, and while the licensing issues of cross border online media are tricky at the best of times, they've achieved something that has been rightly rewarded.
Of course, no smartphone stands 100% alone, most people usually have a computer close by for sideloading of content or doing extensive web browsing, but it's nice to know that your smartphone is clearly not going to be excluded from the fun and games in Moscow as the Czech superhero gypsies, Swedish opera singers, British theatre composers and Belgian Elvis impersonators take to the stage this Saturday.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2009.