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I read in last Friday’s HKEJ that Wong Yuk Man is planning to go online and start his for-fee Internet radio station. Wong figured that if he manages to get enough of his fans to pay him the HK$240 annually they are paying to Commercial Radio for access to CR’s archive to jump ship, then he might have a sustainable business.

I like doing back of the envelop calculations. Let’s draw some figure from thin air: say if 10,000 fans sign up, each paying the annual fee of HK$240, that’s HK$2,400,000 in the bank. Assuming that this exhausts Wong’s fan base, then he has HK$200,000 budget per month.

Wong used to do about 90 minutes of live programme everyday on weekdays at CR1. I don’t see how he could get away with less.

It’s going to be difficult to do live broadcasting/streaming via the Internet. The biggest problem is going to be bandwidth. Let’s say he streams his programmes in 24kbps MP3 (only good for talk shows) which takes ~3KB/s per connection. If only 5000 (not exactly unrealistic, consider his popularity, and if he’s aiming for 10K customers, he’d better plan for the capacity) listen to his show live, his gig is going to be able to pump out 14MB/s. He’s going to need a whole rack of servers and a big fat pipe to HKIX and another to overseas. In any case, that’s going to be relative big money to buy/rent and operate. Wong could sell his surplus capacity to third parties, but I doubt anybody would need, or are willing to pay for the capacity.

Maybe Wong could do it together with Tai Pan.

Live 365 may be an alternative to running their own gig. The monthly bill for 5000 simultaneous listeners at 64K should be around HK$58,500. Running your own gig for the same capacity wouldn’t be much cheaper, if you factor in expenses such as qualified network admin, equipment investment and wear and tear, etc.

Podcasting OTOH is a lot more operator-friendly. Wong could offer MP3 files of his programmes at a much higher bit rate, and because live streaming is not necessary (no 5000 downloads at the same time!) it’s going to be much easier on bandwidth requirement. However, in any case Wong will still need at least a few servers and some big fat pipe to HKIX and to overseas for the operation.

I am not entirely sure that advertising on Wong’s Internet programmes is going to be worth very much. The number of listeners are just not there, compared with CR1.

Textdrive ran an interesting and successful campaign for raising its funding. We could definitely learn from this.

A possible campaign for Wong would be to solicit 2,000 sponsers, each paying HK$1,000 to put Wong online for one year. That’s a healthy HK$2M to start the ball rolling. I am pulling these figures out from thin air, but I am sure a lot of people would be willing to pay a bit more to put Wong online.

With the infrastructure in place, it wouldn’t be too difficult to get other interesting people to go online as well.

Sanity check: why would people pay HK$1,000 instead of HK$240?

I don’t think anybody would doubt that Wong could solicit 2,000 sponsers. If he doesn’t get it, then he doesn’t go online, and people get their money back. If the sponsership programme is successful, then Wong can run his operation for one year. There is no risk to the sponsers.

OTOH the general local netizens are not used to paying money for net services. HK$240/year for just Wong’s programme is also kinda poor value compared with CR’s offer. There is absolutely no guarantee that Wong’s operation is viable, or will still be around in 3 or 6 months’ time.

Maybe I should give Wong a call or something.