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Listen to Internet Radio over Wifi
wildumut writes "There's an article on the Register about new WIFI radio tuners, worth a look. 'Wi-Fi is not only freeing up notebook and PDA users to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the home, it's also making Internet radio work (almost) like the real thing.'" The company website has some more information, but these aren't available for sale yet.
Tune in later this year to hear "This is WIFI Radio, a Clear Channel Partner."
Wait - isn't there a serious lag and quality issue?
Since when lag is an important thing for a one way transmission?
As for quality, a 96Kbps MP3 stream sound a lot better than FM radio.
I can buy a radio, listen, enjoy.
only what's available locally, i.e. your 5 ClearChannel stations.
there's no place like ~
So it's like shortwave radio?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
and it will be because of the descendants of things like this.
One day you'll be able to tune into a radio station based on URL, and it will be *the* true revolution for music delivery. Information may or may not want to be free...but it definitely hates coming from central sources.
Newspaper cartoons are to Strongbad as top 40 is to the bands of the future.
Radio revolutionized communications, especially as it became more available to smaller companies. It made a wider range of ideas, music, and personalities available to the common person. Radios eventually became omnipresent - a nearly free (minor cost for a radio and power/batteries) outlet for on-demand contact with the outside world.
Radio's core problem, though, is that there is only a limited spectrum that's both electromagnetically effective and safe for human exposure at high power levels. Otherwise we'd be pulling power from the air instead of wire.
It's still in it's infancy, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if today's clumsy fledgling attempts at digital network-based radio will later be seen as heralding the birth of a whole new medium - same concept as radio, but even more available.
Cable tv, encrypted compressed signals over wire, made it possible to host hundreds (thousands?) of channels, and far cheaper to run them (no broadcasting, less infrastructure per station, etc). The end result: hundreds of channels of purile crap. And mixed in with all that crap are a good number of true gems that never would have seen the light of day in a world of pure airwave broadcasting. The public is now exposed to history, culture, technologies, and news that it never would have had access to before.
I think wifi radio is just one more step in the direction of providing a denser and low-cost medium for propagation of signal. Satelite radio as well (I say let em target regions - even neighborhoods, and let Clear Channel and others be-damned).
Any broadcast medium that brings down the cost of operation for the same general service is inherently a good thing - while it will introduce new content that isn't worth much, it will also allow a wider range of content, and make large-scale advertising income less of a driving survival requirement.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. KORP radio: 30 minutes of continuous top 10 big-studio hits, every hour on the hour.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
But your radio never performed encryption/decryption or balanced your checkbook. Nor was your computer regulated by the FCC. But now that your data processing device has become a communications device, the FCC (or non-US equivalent) has jurisdiction over your computer.
This is why Wi-Fi should never be integrated with the motherboard chipset (a la Centrino). Keep it as an optional add-on. Let the FCC regulate a PC Card or USB device, not the entire computer.
Down with non-optional bundling of law with convenience.