Slashdot Mirror
Cingular to Offer Radio Service
Mika24 writes "Red Herring is reporting that Cingular Wireless will launch a new over-the-air-radio service in conjunction with the TV service they will offer with MobiTV." The music programming will be done by Music Choice and will include rock, urban, country, reggae, jazz, electronica, and classical. From the article: "MobiRadio uses the improving screen capabilities on cell phones to offer album art and information about songs and artists during playback. Cingular said it will expand that capability to let subscribers purchase related ringtones and other content while the music is playing--a set of features made popular by satellite radio providers."
What does Apple think about this? I wonder if future ROKR phones will be raped of the streaming music function...
I don't get it. At all.
What's the point of this service? All those guys and gals with ipods won't care; they already have a better tool for playing the music that they like. Few others will have earbuds for their phones, so they'll either have to put the music on speaker phone (often not available on cells) and annoy everyone around them, or hold their phones up to their ear for hours at a time while they listen to the music.
I can't wait until people start using up their airtime minutes listening to messages like "this music brought to you by [advertiser's name here]".
Rather than trying to bundle music with phones, why can't they bundle wireless more cheaply? Even just improving connectivity with email would be pretty huge in my mind.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
My mobile battery is fine now and can deal with day to day stuff but I can't really see it coping much with TV in my hand.
And on top of that, I'm at a loss to think how often I'd really want to squint at a screen that size. While it's true that I normally have my mobile with me, something like the PSP or similar isn't much larger and seems far more practical.
That's before I even think about what the cost must be to receive these broadcasts.
This might have been interesting 20 years ago. I don't want to watch crappy choppy videos on my cellphone screen. *Maybe* on my Treo 650, but probably not there either. And I certainly don't want pre-programmed "music choice" crap from some lame network running over Cingular.
Hell, I don't really even need my Treo. It was just a good deal, so I went for it even though I don't use 95% of the features.
Let's quit with the iPod+Cell thing already, eh?
The reason I have an iPod is so that I can listen to the music I want , when I want. If I wanted to listen to generic ClearChannel music, I can listen to XM. I have been listenint to my own playlists and I don't think I would listen to radio again, even if it is on a cell phone.
-- I doubt, therefore I might be.
... the iPod does the exact opposite. Plenty of mp3 players have radios, but not iPod -- I'm guessing because people would be less inclined to use iTunes if they were getting their music fix from regular radio. One nice thing about buying from the guys who aren't on top of a market is the buyer is more desparetely accomodated even at the expensive of money making operations like iTunes.
Wireless radio? Who had ever tought that would be possible. Now we'll be able to listen to radio in our cars! Soon these might even be small enough to be carried around. I expect that to happen in the near future, sometime around 1950 or so.
Question: Battery drain mostly occurs from the phone sending a signal to the tower, not from receiving. I don't think this would kill batteries like people think, right? Answers: 1. this would be great for listening to talk radio if podcasting weren't an option--which it isn't for many. 2. The first generation may not be perfect, but the 1st ipod was "lame" too. Many people don't have earbuds now, but they will if they like the idea of listening to the radio. 3. Sadly, not everyone has music tastes as cool and as original as yours so many will be okay with listening to Clearchannel. Conversely, my taste in music is exponentially better than yours.
This sounds a lot like satellite radio, except people will already have the receivers. A big downside with the satellite radios is that you have to buy the receiver. They are now sold at a loss, but you still need to "commit" to a receiver, and, because the receivers are not interchangeable, to a service.
I think that, plus the novel nature of satellite radio, explains why the satellite guys struggle.
I would prefer a service like this to an iPod: if you get satellite radio (or perhaps this new service), you get a lot more variety. I can imagine that if I had an iPod, I'd buy a bunch of songs and then not know what to get. Experimentation would be costly, and disappointment very irritating. Satellite radio has no per-song fee.
Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.
I can imagine that if the cell company does this right, they could get millions of subscribers, very quickly. Perhaps that will force XM and Sirius to merge, because they will be looking pretty sorry once you can listen to cellular-radio music in your car.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Cingular, thanks for telling me what to listen to, now I don't have to make decisions on my own!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
So... uh, what's the big deal? It's a radio... a proprietary radio at that... why not just tune in to Alice, KISS, or whatever else you've got in your area. How is this even remotely useful unless I get to choose what songs I want to hear when?
i already get all the tunes i want for free on my cingular phone - and i mean ALL: everything i have at home already, everything i listen to on internet radio (mostly the kickass stuff over at http://www.somafm.org/), everything in the Virgin Digital library of, what, 2M songs.
oh, right, and all my podcasts
for free
why do these guys think i'm going to be willing to pay AGAIN for music just because the device is different? once you've put the Web on a device (and, ok, a streaming player that's got access to any URL), i'm done
what i'm wondering is: do you think that local storage will be like 80% or 50% of the way you get your stuff to your phone in a year's time?
the orb freeware http://www.orb.com/ STREAMS my stuff to me, local or online somewhere - transcoding it on the fly to adapt to my at-the-moment bitrate and default media player. for Net radio while driving, that's killer. but what about stuff that's at home? i haven't got a huge-ass memory disk for my phone yet...
You'd be surprised what's not on the map in this country. - Mulder
At 8 fps I can almost make out Janet Jackson's tit.
$sig$
Isn't Music Choice the service that got dumped by DirecTV (just this week) in favor of XM?
This new service sounds awful - a handful of genres, using the cellular network to send the music meaning battery life is going to be murdered, and simply a way of trying to push ringtones and CDs on users.
I have Pocket Tunes Deluxe on my Treo 650 so i can listen to streaming internet radio.
It goes through the full charge in about 3 hours.
the battery will last me 2 days with normal daily no web browsing and only checking email every 15min
so yah, it will eat up the battery.
Who run Barter Town?
In some places, Cingular is at capacity on their towers already. The core function of their network - placing phone calls - is sometimes impossible owing to the circuit congestion at peak times. Why add another useless service?
If they're going to HSDPA - completely - then the issue is less importand, but that change years off. Thankfully, nobody will use this service, so the effect isn't all that great. But I wish they'd concentrate on the core functions of the network before adding stupid features.
... for the device will weigh in at 25 pounds and come in a shoulder bag. Jeebus. What ELSE can they pack in that sucks the life out of the the battery?
If Cingular is planning on offering this type of service the possibility to do it well exists. Personally I don't think they will pull it off with anything more than what others have already called one more extention of clearchannel's cookie cutter generic Pop40.
But if they did take streaming media and integrate it well into over-the-air broadcasting you could see some fairly cool things done. Think if they teamed up with last.fm people. Everything you choose to listen to creates a station of things you would probably like to hear. Hell they could even tailor this somewhat to advertising, since that is so likely to follow. Not that hard of a stretch to target product/ad placement based on listening profiles.
I know I've already planned on picking up the Nokia N80 when(or maybe IF, knowing Nokia) it comes out to replace my current phone. It has Visual Radio support and comes with stereo headphones, so I think phones will start to go that route more and more, espically with services like this trying to take advantage of it.
A "fold-up" antenna for AM radio would have to be quite long to be efficient. It's not in the cards for a device the size of a cell phone. Even a ferrite rod antenna is bigger than most cell phones, and would take up too much space inside the case. Plus, I'd hate to think what a chunk of metal that size would do to the normal phone function.
This is a plan that looks great on paper, and sounds lousy in reality.
Cell service providers are all about upping minutes usage, which translates to maximising usage of their infrastructure, which CFO's love. It improves some ratio like hardware amortization cost to utilization.
Somebody at Cingular put all this together and said "aha! I'm buying a boat next year!" Don't make that downpayment until the results come back, buddy...
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
for you who moded me as a troll: you are a jerk that doesn't get a joke.
I was THIS close to spending $3 on a portable AM/FM radio I can carry around in my pocket, but thanks to Cingular's new phone+radio combo plan, now I can spend 50 times the money to listen to the same thing AND pay extra per month for it too!
/sarscasm
Wow! I never knew radio could be so much fun!
This reminds me of the old joke about a consultant charging you to use your own watch to tell you want time it is. Except Cingular is taking broadcast radio you can get for free and charging you for it.
TV on phones has the same problem: you can buy a lowend portable TV for under $20 (yes, you can!) or even a decent one for under $100 and watch broadcast TV for free, OR you can buy a cell phone with TV, get a handful of channels, and pay lots per month for it.
Sig for hire.
The IPod + satellite radio = Cellular radio
Ok so I like the idea of a portable player that can plug into my car stereo or my home stereo. It plays all the songs I like. Great so I get an Ipod. But I don't have the time to listen to new music (through some other means other than my IPod), write down the artist name, go online and download the song to my ipod. I just don't have the time and therefore my IPod's playlist is not that great. So I looked into satellite radio, but found out that it will not work (I have head phones), when I'm at work inside a building, or in my car going through the big dig tunnel in Boston. I also will have to listen to someone else's playlist.
But wait! What if I had a portable radio that did both. It worked indoors like an Ipod, it played music from a playlist like satellite radio! This is what Cingular is doing with this service. But it gets better! This service's play list will be controlled from a server that knows who I am, NOT from a satellite that is just broadcasting a signal.
In the future the cellular providers will be able to let customers customize this service. Play only songs from these artists, play new songs of this type of music, play only these songs, don't play that song again, play the stuff I want to listen to. This is why this is much bigger and better than the Ipod and satellite radio.
...
The technology to do this has been commercialized for at least 4 years.
XSVoice has been streaming audio from the NET to cell phones since late 2000.
The audio quality is not great (read as 5 cent phone speaker), but with an earbud it is quite tolerable.
Also, the selection of streams is quite a bit more diverse.
Disclaimer - I am not an employee, just knowledgeable about the technology.
When you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
You just wait. Radio will change EVERYTHING! If you thought the record companies had it bad now with the pirates, wait untill we can hear our songs free over the air! It'll be pandemonium!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
from Cingular. I have had several mobile providers and I am having more problems getting a signal with Cingular than with any other provider. I wish they'd improve the network before they add useless extra features.
Go phone, good reception, prompt voicemail, caller ID. No convergence with other devices. Simplicity made the iPod popular. I want a phone with the same philiosphy.
I am currently an XM subscriber, but I'm about to ditch them after 1 year of service (got the thing for Christmas last year).
/know/ I like alot more. So I think I have come to the conclusion that I would rather hear my OWN music collection than something picked out for me.
I agree, this sounds basically like the cellular companies are turning your cell phone into a "satellite" radio. This should compete directly against them - IF they can broadcast with equal coverage like satellite does. If cellular radio can actually stream specific content to specific customers that could bury satellite radio.
The reason I'm ditching XM though, is first of all, because of the price of gas, we are trying to cut back, and every little bit helps, even $10/month. But secondly, I haven't been as impressed with XM radio as I thought I would be. Yes, commercial free is nice (most channels are commercial free), but I find that the "popular" channels (80s, 90s, Country, etc.), don't seem to play many "A side" songs - they all seem to be "B side" songs. That is, (for those of you before vinyl), they don't seem to run many Top 10 songs. You listen to the 80s channel, for example, and every once in a while you will hear a song that makes you go, "Oh yeah, I remember that one!" But most of them I have never heard before. Thirdly, I find myself channel surfing a lot because I'm not happy with what I'm hearing. I find myself returning to my self-burned CDs of songs I
If we were keeping our cell phones (we are also cancelling our 2-phone $80/month family plan with Verizon in favor of going back to a "land line" through Vonage for $25/month) I might consider cellular radio - IF it did not consume phone airtime, IF it cost no more than XM radio, and if it would FM broadcast to my car radio or otherwise hook into it.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
...then potentially you aren't listening to a 99 cent iTunes song. I think that is the primary reason. And yes I am aware you can have tracks have other than iTunes on the iPod, but the theory is still probably valid from an Apple marketing decision viewpoint.
Why has this been modded down but not the grand-parent, particularly given the grand-parent was being gratuitously offensive instead of making a valid point about tasteless analogies?
Sprint has had seventeen Sirius music channels broadcasting to vision-capable phones for months now. So where's the post about Sprint's already-here music?
Guess it got lost behind ROKR posts.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
I can see this being very useful to have around with you in the car, competing with satellite radio, and potentially offering more channels. Many car kits already include external speakers.
:)
Sound quality over a cellphone may be rough, but this is made up for by the ability to have the music follow you as you get out of your car
Since Cingular themselves are offering this service, it would be absurd of them to charge for minutes/KB that it uses (I wouldn't put it past them, though). Cingular could offer an exemption from normal airtime billing for all minutes/KB used by this radio service. I'm assuming that this will be billed instead as a separate per-month flat charge, on the monthly bill.
Commercials could also subsidize the charges completely. If commercials could make enough money for Cingular to offset the cost of the airtime, then this competes with terrestrial radio as well (not just satellite radio)!
If Cingular also/instead gives the choice of normal minutes/KB billing for airtime used by this radio service, I could see this being a useful way to burn up excess minutes. I have 4000 minutes rolled over that I'll never use, Cingular expires minutes after 12 months, and I'm at 10 months now!
I'm hoping they have a wide selection of channels to choose from. I'd love to see more affiliates than just Music Choice (their selection of channels, already on most cable TV services, is pretty lame).
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Playback will use a lot of battery, the high quality codecs like aacPlus use a lot of CPU power to decode.
MP3 and AAC-LC (i.e. normal AAC) are a lot easier to decode and hence use less horsepower. AAC-HE (aka aacPlus) is effectively synthesizing the high end of the spectrum and that takes a lot of horsepower.
``Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.``
Practically speaking, I don't have to have RIAA permission to put stuff on my iPod.
But Sat Radio has to pay a lot or royalties and follow the rules set by the RIAA.
Those mix tapes and mashups? You don't think they include copyrighted sound recordings?!