The world's first Internet car radio?

  • Wanna Join? New users you can now register lightning fast using your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Fila

www.sactownradio.com
Apr 25, 2002
1,395
2
0
www.sactownradio.com
#1


If you're the type of driver who finds Sirius XM's options too limited and just laughs at the idea of tuning in to a regular old terrestrial radio signal, then you might be interested in this: Internet radio site miRoamer.com and tech manufacturer Blaupunkt are joining forces for what they claim is "the world's first Internet car radio." Get this thing installed in your dashboard and you can listen to SacTownRadio while you're on the road.
 

CNI

Sicc OG
Aug 8, 2007
662
0
0
49
#2
All I can say is; It`s about time!

Sirius XM is in some serious financial trouble right now. Shock jock Howard Stern will most likely be gone as soon as his contract expires, if not sooner. I do like the fact of having options as both a businessman and listener, but I personally feel that internet radio is going to be the standard of the future. The fans have long hated traditional radio and when satellite radio stepped in, outside of uncensored content, they didn`t really separate themselves as I thought they would.

If Sirius XM were to open the door to those interested in operating a radio station, such as Sactown Radio, I think they could survive and become a solid rival for internet radio. If they don`t............... they`ll go down in history as another failed technological advance just like the Beta tape and mini disk.
 

Fila

www.sactownradio.com
Apr 25, 2002
1,395
2
0
www.sactownradio.com
#3
Not Your Dad's Radio Anymore

There used to be a time when FM radio mattered to taking your band to the next level.

Your band could only get so big without having the major radio networks from coast-to-coast pushing your hits down the throats of listeners day in and out.

Lots of radio people were paid off to play music that never would have seen the light of day otherwise.

Alan Freed and Dick Clark got busted in the late 1950's for payola. Freed was a drunk with a big mouth and wasn't liked so they threw the book at him. Clark was squeaky clean because of American Bandstand and knew how to smooth feathers like a slick politician so he got off the hook essentially.

One died forgotten, the other ended up being our New Year's host in Times Square.

But when Shawn Fanning starting pushing for illegal downloading of music , the entire music industry collapsed, slowly but surely, dragging the concert industry and radio industry down with it.

There have been a lot of mistakes that the music industry has made over the past 8 years when dealing with the downloading issue but the largest one currently messing their future up is in radioland.

FM radio doesn't matter anymore.

There i said it.

FM radio's power to break a band and make them huge was essentially killed by MySpace and YouTube.

We have moved from a society that wants things fed to us, to one that wants to seek them out.

When radio limited their playlists to only hits and eliminated local disc jockeys to save money and pay shareholders that never should have invested in the "arts" in the first place, they signed their death certificates.

Then satellite radio came along.

XM and Sirius Radio.

Both had their positives no doubt.

But all they've ended up becoming are the 8-track era of radio.

A transition.

Not because they suck at what they do or because of the recent merger.

Not even because their stock is practically junk at .13 cents a share.

It's because portable web radio is going to wipe it all out.

Yes, the Pandora model will ultimately be known as killing commercial radio in its current state.

It'll be the MySpace to Clear Channel's radio network.

Yes, Congress, the RIAA, the major radio network owners and the label-created and backed new media royalty collector SoundExchange have lobbied hard to make sure that the rates per song/per stream to play music on your own web radio station are so prohibitively high that only major companies could afford them, effectively wiping out independent web radio operators.

Even Pandora is still rumored to be closing shop due to the increased royalty payments that they've been stuck with despite their popularity as one of the top applications for the iPhone.

Regardless of the doom, in late December the following press release ended up in my email box:

Blaupunkt and miRoamer Unveil Internet Radio for the Car

By Eliot Van Buskirk December 31, 2008 2:55:06 PMCategories: Audio, Automotive, CES 2009
Blaupunkt and miRoamer will announce a partnership at CES that will put internet radio into car dashboards for the first time. Blaupunkt prototypes pictured here show the technology in action.

"miRoamer's development with Blaupunkt is the first seamless Internet radio solution," said miRoamer founder and CEO George Parthimos. "With the simple push of a button, users can access AM/FM stations or Internet radio's thousands of music, entertainment, news and talk stations from around the world, all from the same car stereo."


So, give this little gadget idea a few years and our cars will come with web radio capability effectively wiping out FM radio's stranglehold on making music known once and for all.

How, how can that happen when I just pointed out above that royalty payments above are cost-prohibitive for anyone but the same large FM corporations to be able to afford?

Because I think the music industry is starting to wake up and realize that they have to start thinking creatively when it comes to working with the "underground", per se, and start to embrace them instead of suing them and over-charging them all the time into non-existence.

This is what I think the music industry should do:

1) Remember what the hell the word "promotion" meant.

"Promotion" in the label radio department meant "pay off Music Director 'A' in Buffalo to play the new Good Charlotte single." The same word in the publicity and A&R department meant to spread the band's name, image and music around to enough people to help them grow their audience and, hopefully, make everyone involved (including the artist, remember them?) to make some money. So, remember, having an entity want to "promote" your band doesn't mean they should have to pay for that right, necessarily. If you need to get paid for every single thing your artists do to promote themselves now in order to be able to pay your CEO's $20 million dollar a year salary, maybe tell the CEO to go work at a bank. They're making nice money now from the Feds, aren't they?

2) Get real about web royalty payments. Do you want only a few companies to determine the fate of your artists' careers? Do you only want the top 5 or 7 companies in the country to control who gets played on the web? It doesn't matter if it's Clear Channel or AOL- why should they be the only ones to be able to play music?

Why don't you ask your artists what they would prefer? The majority of artists don't think like Metallica, believe me.

Remember, college radio broke R.E.M., Nirvana and Soundgarden. Embracing the underground again actually helps your company because, more often than not, they'll know what artists are going to be big a long time before anyone at your label does. So embrace independent web radio and work to lower the royalty payments to realistic numbers. Oh, and don't whine about having to charge high pricing so you can pay the artists the money they deserve to sustain their careers. Most of these artists aren't getting paid squat from you after the initial advance as you're recouping all of those costs and expenses you refuse to disclose in any sensible accounting form unless the band sues you to get an adequate audit of said costs and expenses.

3) Go talk to some of the M.I.T. geniuses about building an platform that would allow independent web radio operators to have their radio stations set up on a model like the Virgin Mobile system- a pay-as-you-go model. Web radio operators would go to a music hub site, go through the music library (like disc jockeys used to do before their air shifts were planned out by some paid-off consultant in Chicago), click on the music they wanted to play and next to each song would be a blanket price per stream. Something reasonable, remember? The point is to expose music to people not hide it behind lawyers.

Each song would be tagged with a marker so that the number of times it was streamed on the web site by a listener could be tracked and counted and the fees for having that song played per listener could be calculated. The web radio operator's account with this music hub would be hooked into their paypal account and they could also set it up so that if they only wanted to spend so much money on music streams at one time, they could create a cap on their account so that only so many listeners could be allowed to be tuned into that station at one time. Kind of like not being able to get into a full chat room. Essentially, it's like the way we buy advertising on Facebook.

I know it's in rough form and all of the parties involved will say it's not fair in one way or another and shouldn't even be tried but I really believe that the number of people in the music industry that understand what needs to be done are starting to out-number the number of people that still don't.

It's like this- the old guard are Bush thinking the best way to deal with "enemies" is to push them around and threaten. The new guard are like Obama, you sit down with them and find ways to work together to meet one's objectives and create "peace" for all.

So, I ask the music industry power-brokers that listen too much to their attorneys and not enough to their publicity departments that...

Are you ready to make "peace" with the underground (again)?
 

Fila

www.sactownradio.com
Apr 25, 2002
1,395
2
0
www.sactownradio.com
#4
'Internet radio will greatly benefit from the coming of viable mobile WiMAX, a wireless standard which will bring Internet radio to portable devices including car stereos.

Once the infrastructure is in place to support in-car broadband systems using a truly mobile WiMAX standard, that speed and coverage will make in-car Internet access commonplace, effectively killing satellite and terrestrial radio.

Satellite radio will surely die once Internet radio is truly mobile and portable. Satellite radio is limited to a couple hundred channels verses Internet radios unlimited channels. And Internet radio stations can operate on low overhead which means they can also take more chances with specialized programming.

Plus the expense of maintaining satellites and the virtual nonexistence of satellite radio outside of the United States means that third-party developers would much rather base their in-car media systems around an existing, low-maintenance, worldwide Internet platform.

Internet radio stations don't necessarily need as big an audience as a terrestrial station to be successful and they don't need to run 20 minutes of commercials every hour to be profitable.

Automation software is affordable and allows an Internet programmer to easily run an on-line radio station 24/7 with live DJ's or pre-recorded programming.

For these and many other reasons, the playing field is actually tipping toward the Internet programmers.

As Internet Radio is finally un-tethered from the desktop computer or similar Internet appliances, a new era of independent “Mom & Pop” proprietors will emerge to compete against both satellite radio and the older AM and FM technology.'
 
Jun 9, 2009
1
0
0
62
#7
The worlds first Internet car radio

... Konpalover
Thats right folks you read it right Tune in at 9PM for this weeks edition of the Tease with KL. This will be his first tease so dont miss it . And since we know KL brings the party on, the weekend offiicially starts TONIGHT
 
Apr 19, 2005
1,535
0
0
www.SacTownRadio.com
#8
Clearwire to Launch WiMax in Las Vegas on July 21
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service


Clearwire will start offering its mobile WiMax wireless data service commercially in Las Vegas on July 21, building on its still-sparse coverage area with a fourth major city.

The service provider is gradually rolling out a planned national network based on the standardized technology, offering fast Internet access at home and on the road. It launched WiMax service in Portland, Oregon, in January and in Atlanta last month. A Baltimore network turned on last year by Sprint Nextel will also become part of Clearwire's system. The WiMax service, called Clear, is designed to offer between 4Mb per second (Mbps) and 6Mbps.

Clearwire will kick off the Las Vegas network with a consumer event at the Town Square Mall at 4 p.m. July 21, it said in a media advisory Tuesday.

The company, formed by Sprint and the original Clearwire wireless broadband provider, has set up WiMax demonstration networks in Las Vegas during telecommunications trade shows in the past. Now, WiMax will go on sale to the average consumer there for the first time. Las Vegas is a city of more than 500,000 residents in a county of nearly 2 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Mobile WiMax is based on an already-completed standard and is being deployed by a number of service providers around the world. But the technology will need to share the market for fast 4G (fourth-generation) mobile data with LTE (Long-Term Evolution). There are no major commercial LTE networks today, but that technology has been chosen by many of the world's mobile operators.

Clearwire has said it will also offer service this year in cities including Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Seattle, Honolulu and Charlotte, North Carolina. It will serve 80 markets, including New York, Washington, Houston, Boston and San Francisco, by the end of next year, the company has said.

The service is sold on a variety of plans, from a US$10 day pass to a $40 monthly mobile Internet plan. Client devices are offered at Clear's own retail shops and some Best Buy stores. Several cable operators plan to resell the service, and Comcast is already offering it in Portland.