Portable Internet Radio to take on XM?

TheDude writes "A friend who works for a design company attended the Australian EDN awards last night and was impressed with one of the winners, in the wireless category, which was won by Grey Innovation for their Infusion device . It's a Linux based portable internet radio that streams Internet Radio over WiFi. Is this the future of Radio? Given the big push by XM and Sirus , the potential of Podcasting and now the "inFusion", in which direction is mass-audio-broadcast heading? And why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?"

Comments

DAB isn't the last word in radio

[Larry Lightbulb]

If you want a high bit rate and stereo then the BBCs DAB broadcasts won't always be what you expect - take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalradio/faqs/answer_03c. shtml for some of them. A quick search will find you plenty of other pages detailing the shortcomings of the current set-up.

Re:XM is quite horrendous

[jlink7]

First of, sir, you're obviously listening to the wrong stations. Unless you explore more than a couple of the available stations, yes, it may seem like they play music that is a bit more uncommon to hear than on normal broadcast radio-- but then again, broadcast radio rock MUST play the same music over and over (and over) again on the same station.

On XM, there is more than one "rock station" that would play music that broadcast stations must play on the same station, save some of your huge market cities where there may be a bit more selection of stations. XM offers quite a few different "genres" of rock stations-- Ethel plays songs from the alternative genre.. from Blink 182 to Nirvana. Boneyard plays your hard rock, which has a pretty huge fanbase...

Aww hell, just look for yourself. The description on the XM Radio [XMRadio.com] website does a fairly good job in explaining this anyway.