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Linux-based Internet Radio Appliance
sysadmn writes "From CMP Media's Winmag Win Letter, A company called Kerbango has built what it bills as the world's first standalone Internet radio, which can play any of the claimed 4,000 audio streams floating around the Net as well as more conventional AM or FM broadcasts. Tuning is accomplished through the Kerbango Tuning Service, which displays the user interface on a half-VGA grayscale LCD monitor. The radio has
a built-in computer, with an 80MHz PowerPC chip running Linux with 8MB of DRAM, 8MB of flash memory, and a whole bunch of codecs.
It'll be available in the Spring. They're not saying how much.
"
A little box that plugs into the Internet and gives me my radio. A little box that plugs into the TV and lets me play games. A little box that plugs into the cable line and watches my TV for me.
They say the PC is going the way of the dinosaur-- after all, these little boxes are so much cheaper!
Cool, it runs Linux. Cool, it uncrunches streaming MP3. But I've got a PC that does that.
And funny, that very same PC plays games, too. And it can watch TV for me. And it keeps track of my finances and my recipes. You know, all those things I'd've had to buy a $200-300 little consumer-grade box to do. But somehow, those little single-purpose boxes sell.
A hundred bucks gets you into a low-end webtv. Another three hundred gets you into a cheap set-top DVD player. Toss in a hundred for a Playstation, a hundred for a VCR, at least a hundred for this gadget. That's $700-- and we're using last generation's game box, an analog system for watching our TV for us... Switching to a Dreamcast and a Tivo turns that $700 into closer to $1000. And I still can't do my finances, can't do word processing (and I don't have a place to plug a printer in even if I could!) and I can't store my recipes, $1000 later.
And then what we don't get are HDTV cards for our PCs that already have monitors with sufficient resolution to display HDTV.
I don't get it. Why is it these little single-use boxes sell? Is the general public really _that_ afraid of a general purpose personal computer?
-JDF
This raises some questions:
- Can their servers handle the traffic?
- As someone else here has pointed out: "What if the company goes belly up?"
- How does the company decide what category a signal will be filed under?
- What decides the placement? Will they accept payment from the broadcasters?
- What's their policy on advertising. Will any appear on the display? (Or worse, *in the audio*?)
- Will they make an effort to carry *all* streams, or will they focus on the most popular?
- Will they censor any streams that they regard as "inappropriate for a general audience"?
This is not to say that these aren't *answerable* questions. But they need to be addressed...What I'm really interested in seeing is a good "internet transistor radio" (when they finally release palm pilots with both Richochet and an audio jack, I'll be happy... you can squeeze listenable audio over a Richochet modem, high-quality audio can come later). Second to that, I'm sure an "internet car radio" would be of interest to all the people stuck in car commuting. This particular type of gadget is third down the list. Certainly it's a drawback that it's stationary, but a webradio for the bedroom/livingroom that's cheaper than a full PC would still fill a niche. At least it has a quarter-VGA screeen on it that allows for *some* flexibility in what you can do with it.
The great advantage of a web radio would be to get people out from under the corporate conglomerate blandness that the world seems to be sinking under.
The great danger is that in the effort to make it simpler to access web radio streams, they'll take away some of your freedom to choose what you hear.
You'd have to be asleep at the corporate wheel not to know by now that the latest fad is making every computing device resemble this purple device over here. Look at where the kerbango's knobs correspond to the imac's speakers, and we needn't say more about the silly colors. It'll pass, and on some future day in 20 years, someone will take the shell off a Dell machine (with the trunk in the back this time) and slap a colored one on and consumers will snatch them up in a massive coordinated fit of orgasmic nostalgia. I plan to be very cranky when it happens.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It's a very interesting time to be involved in Internet Radio