Wi-Fi Enabled Stereo From Philips In Beta

Orangerobot writes "Philips Electronics is undergoing the beta test for the latest model in the Streamium line called the MC-i250. You have to trudge through a cheesy Flash presentation to get all the details, but it looks pretty good: Wi-Fi, CDDB support, online playlist management and more. It looks like they might actually get it right." Reader UVWarning's review of the current generation of Streamium indicates plenty of ways the next generation could improve on the current one.

Comments

Limited music stations

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

If this thing is limited to certain internet music stations like its predecessor, you can write it off without thinking twice.

They are playing right into my lap...

[Max Romantschuk]

My WLAN enabled home media server plan is getting hotter by the minute... bwahahaaa!

No, but seriously, this is really the solution which makes sense... Why do you have to physically put a disc into your stereo to listen to something? It should be enough to buy the rights to listening (CD or not), have it on a media server of your own or stream right off the net.

Think of the possibilities for internet radio stations and indie artists if every home stereo could do stuff like that... yay! :)

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[Max Romantschuk]

Their servers would die because of the overload

Not necessarily. Unless I'm misinformed IP broadcasting enables streaming to multiple recipients using one TCP-feed. And solutions like PeerCast are creating yet another option.

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[daBass]

IP broadcasting can be done, especialy when IPv6 arrives but even then the carriers will want more money than broadcasters have. On the internet, both sending and recieving party pay.

Peercast will die the fate of popular P2P networks. Hailed as "the more users the better it works", the reality is: "too many users and it dies becasue non of these users have enough bandwidth to be hub". I have seen 10Mbit connections die because a PC was a Kazaa host. Kazaa saw it had a lot of bandwidth and made it a master. Ofcourse IT infrastructure shut this PC down.

Either that or the horizon will be too close and many stations are out of range, just like cool FM station in the other town.

Re:As a concerned American patriot,

[trelanexiph]

I look at this as someone who's been directly involved in bringing ogg/vorbis to both streaming mediums, and hardware players. Put quite simply if you want ogg vorbis support to pirate music you might as well stick with mp3pro, or mp3. Roughly (if not less than) .5% of music on the P2P networks is in Ogg Vorbis format, and quite frankly we're happy to see it that way. So how can Ogg Vorbis be supporting piracy, if none of the pirates are using Ogg Vorbis?

Re:gracenote CDDB - bleh

[pherris]

If it can be changed to use FreeDB instead of CDDB I'd be pretty happy.

Don't bet on it. To use CDDB one must agree not to support any other similar systems like FreeDB.

From "Why freedb.org" at freedb.org:

As Escient has changed the terms of licence for accessing CDDB, some programmers complained that the new licence includes certain terms that threatens them in a way they cannot accept: If you want to access CDDB, you are not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database (this one, for example) ...

Besides from what I've read in the past Philip's net radios require some hacking to get them to work with personal streaming servers. Changing anything past the volume seems to be controlled by Philips. It's too bad since I suspect they could sell a lot more if people could modify the onboard software.