Virgin Radio first in UK with interactive video radio

Virgin Radio aims to be the first company in the UK, and the second in the world, to provide interactive video radio.

The station plans to launch the service before the end of the year.

By early next year, Nokia plans to release a software upgrade that will allow users to take advantage of the service and expects that 100 million handsets will work with Virgin Radio by 2007.

Reidar Wasenius, Nokia senior project manager, said: "We already have devices with FM radio. To make them visual and interactive is simply a matter of adding software to our smart phones. There is no conflict with DAD (digital audio devices). We will be quite happy to provide those later.

"But FM is what we have. It's very simple. It's here. It's today. It will be a mass market and real volume. It will go on the high-end series 90 devices, on the series 60s and even the series 40s."

He added that Nokia would be launching 10 devices next year.

A Virgin Radio spokesman said the move would allow the station to deepen its relationship with the listening public. The interactive function would let listeners vote on records, buy MP3s and ring tones, take part in sponsorships and campaigns and buy tickets for concerts and other products and services via their phones.

The interactive function will also make it easy for the station to compile 'most wanted' music tracks and to tell from minute to minute how many users are watching the video clips and how many are listening. Currently it can only do this with online listeners and has to rely on quarterly survey figures to find out how many offline listeners it has.

The phones will be able to play content synchronised to the radio programmes, including video clips of recording artists, news, sport, traffic and weather reports. And the stations will be able to target users with ads sent directly to the phones.

Nokia is developing the GPRS network technology with Hewlett-Packard. It has signed up one station in Finland and Nokia's Wasenius is confident it will have signed up another in South-East Asia by the time the phones are launched.

The touch screen Nokia 7700 is due for release in the UK early next year.