Audible first created spoken word products in 1997. In those early days Audible created not only content but hardware as well. It was the first company to create a portable Flash player. The Audible MobilePlayer™, boasting 4Mb of memory, is now an exhibit at the Smithsonian Permanent Collection.

Audible's foray into hardware was brief. As specialist hardware developers emerged, Audible focused on its strength in content creation, protection, and distribution. Concentrating on content development has seen Audible build at catalog of over one hundred thousand hours of audio; covering books and news, in English and other languages.

To support content distribution, given Audible's withdrawal from hardware development, Audible created a program called "AudibleReady," designed to allow manufacturers of portable devices to create products with the capability to play Audible content. The program has resulted in some 200 devices available in the market today that are compatible with Audible's content. These devices include not only traditional portable music players and Apple iPods™, but also GPS units and in-car systems, amongst others.

Portable media players typically require their users to connect to PCs to upload content. As mobile phones started to incorporate the ability to play audio, Audible naturally looked for ways to leverage these devices' wireless capability. "We saw a great opportunity with mobile phones to allow us to extend the delivery of Audible content," says Chia-Lin Simmons, VP of Strategic Alliances at Audible. "To achieve this we created AudibleAir, making Audible content accessible to our customers anytime, anywhere, without the need for a PC."

AudibleAir was launched for the Palm platform at CTIA in September 2005, with a S60 2nd Edition version following in January 2006. AudibleAir does more than simply allow Audible's customers to access their virtual bookshelf and download content directly to their mobile phone. "AudibleAir has extended the mobility of our offering," says Chia-Lin. "We have used the connectivity of mobile devices to allow users to pre-emptively download content. Our smart engine can automatically downloaded content overnight, ready for listening in the morning. I use this myself. I have an hour's commute to and from work. So I have AudibleAir on my Sony Ericsson programmed to download the Wall Street Journal for my morning commute and a book for my evening commute. When I get in my car I already have the newspaper ready to listen to. The client also intelligently downloads portions of my book as I listen to it. I have told AudibleAir that I have a one hour commute, so it downloads an hour's worth of material at first. But, if the previous day's commute had only been forty minutes, AudibleAir downloads just the extra forty minutes it needs to give me my hour's listening for today, adding it to the twenty minutes I didn't listen to yesterday."

With time critical content, such as the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, Audible could have used a text-to-speech application to ensure timely delivery. However, Audible has found that its customers prefer a human voice. As a result Audible has built a network of readers worldwide to enable production of spoken versions of newspapers at about the same time the print versions hit the streets.

Audible uses its own proprietary .aa file format to deliver DRM protected audio. The .aa format allows Audible to deliver around an hour of audio in 3.8Mb using its "Format 2", while the higher fidelity "Format 3" requires around 7.2Mb. Compared to typical audio codecs this is very compact. By contrast 3.8 MB of MP3 delivers just 5 minutes of music. As content gets more diverse, including the use of music and more elaborate production, Chia-Lin says Audible will adopt new codecs "in order to continue to offer listeners the best experience."

Extending AudibleAir onto UIQ 3 was a natural progression for Audible, given Sony Ericsson's global reach and strong position in music oriented mobile phones. At the same time there was strong interest from Sony Ericsson. "Audible already had an extensive and popular catalog of spoken word content for portable music players and had shown considerable success on the iPod," says Marie-Louise Olsson, Communications Manager for Sony Ericsson's Developer Program. "We believed that Audible would complement our UIQ 3 phones well, by building on the basic functionality of the devices with an appealing service. It also ties in well with our mobile music initiatives, showing how third-party developers can extend the music experience." The fact that Audible has international offerings - for French, German and other languages, in addition to popular English language titles - was also consistent with Sony Ericsson's desire to sell highly localized products.

The first meeting between the two companies took place at CTIA, in September 2005.

Audible's focus on content development means that it maintains engineering expertise in developing general audio delivery and playback technologies, DRM and back-end systems. However, when it came to creating the UIQ 3 version of AudibleAir, Audible decided the best approach was to hire specialists in UIQ. This resulted in UK developer EMCC being engaged to do the port, a task they had already performed for AudibleAir's S60 2nd Edition version.

"Working with Sony Ericsson has been a wonderful experience," says Chia-Lin. "We found the partner manager and technical support from Developer World to be excellent. Even though we are six hours behind Sweden, Sony Ericsson has always been available to us when we needed them. We have special requirements for our audio playback, such as automatic bookmarking and chapter skipping, which are not seen in music applications. As a result, many of our questions went beyond that which might normally be answered of technical support, but Sony Ericsson always found the resource we needed to get us the right answer."

The relationship with EMCC benefited from the fact that it is located in Manchester, UK, close to where Sony Ericsson maintains its smartphone development team and Symbian OS developers. This allowed the EMCC and Sony Ericsson teams to work closely together and had benefits for the development of both Sony Ericsson's UIQ implementation and AudibleAir.

"Working closely with EMCC and our other Try and Buy partners allowed us to accelerated our development work," says Marie-Louise. "Audible's experience helped us find bugs and identify improvements in our implementation of the UIQ 3 audio APIs. Working together I believe we were able to make improvements that other developers will benefit from. It was also part of a wider cooperation with UIQ and Symbian that helped resolved OS, platform and device issues swiftly."

However, it was not just technical issues that Audible and EMCC helped Sony Ericsson understand better. "It's undeniable that some of our Try and Buy partners, such as Audible, went through a little early pain, but that helped us learn a lot about the information we need to be communicating to developers," says Marie-Louise. "As a result we have created Developer World pages providing more information on Symbian Signed and certificates. We have added over twenty tricks and tips as well as code samples, all of which have been created based on the challenges encountered by our early developers."

"I hope that the success of our partnership with Audible will encourage other third-party developers to work with us," says Marie-Louise. "This is especially true since we have an open call for audio applications to support our Walkman offerings, such as the UIQ 3 based W950."

AudibleAir is available as a Try and Buy application on the M600i and will be available as a Try and Buy application on the P990 and W950 when they are released later this year.

More information on Sony Ericsson's Music initiative can be found at: www.sonyericsson.com/developer/music