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."

Comments

I don't get it

[ThatGeek]

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.

Who really wants this?

[TheoGB]

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.

Lame.

[Seumas]

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?

over-the-air-radio service

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

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.

Yet Another Pay-Twice Solution

[montale127]

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...