For many people, satellite radio is the latest thing in audio. Instead of listening to regular old FM, you can buy a player from Sirius or its main competitor, XM, and listen to crystal-clear radio at home or in your car, after paying about $400 or so for the player and accessories, and about $15 a month for the service itself.
Over the past year or so, however, there has been talk about a new take on another technology -- Internet radio -- that has the potential to disrupt both the world of satellite radio and good old terrestrial radio. It's called WiFi radio, or wireless Internet radio, and some say its time could be coming soon, thanks to cheaper radio chips and the increasing penetration of public wireless networks.
Internet radio has been around since the Web first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, thanks in large part to the development of the MP3 music-compression standard. When high-speed connections started to become commonplace, people began to share the songs they had downloaded, setting up what amounted to private radio networks with software such as Winamp.
Traditional radio stations also started streaming their music over the Web, and still do, although in many cases their ability to do so has been hampered by copyright regulations, which restrict what they can play over the Internet. (Unfortunately, the licensing agreements that allow radio stations to play songs on the radio don't always allow them to "broadcast" the same music over the Internet.)
As high-speed Internet access has spread, so have the number of sources for online radio, including hundreds of informal "channels" devoted to different styles of music, all available for free. And as wireless networking has become more popular over the past couple years, people have started looking for an easy way to stream their digital music throughout their homes.
That has led to products such as the Roku SoundBridge and Sonos sound systems, both of which connect to your home network and PC, and can stream music to speakers in other rooms or to other computers and stereo equipment. A British company called Acoustic Energy came out with an Internet radio device last year that is just like a high-end stereo component, except that it pulls Internet radio stations in via any open WiFi connection.
Such devices, however -- like the Kerbango, an Internet radio appliance that 3Com acquired in 2000 and then just as quickly shelved -- are expensive or not really portable. And that is where the revolution, if there is one, is likely to come from. Several groups are working on wireless radio products that are not only cheap, but small and portable and can pick up Internet radio broadcasts, all the way from traditional radio stations to freelance DJs.
Torian, a small technology company in Australia, has developed and is marketing a wireless Internet radio device called the InFusion, which is about the size of an MP3 player or satellite radio receiver. It can stream radio from the Internet over any open WiFi hot spot, and can also record music onto removable flash-memory cards. It also plays FM radio and MP3 files, and is powered by a rechargeable battery.
And Cambridge Consultants, a British firm, has said that it will show a prototype for an even cheaper portable WiFi radio device at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The company says its Iona design -- a battery-powered Internet radio -- could be made for just $15 (U.S.), which means that companies could manufacture and sell the devices for as little as $50, or combine it with existing devices such as MP3 players, FM radios, cellphones or PDAs.
"Traditional radios offer listeners the choice of relatively few stations that have to appeal to a very broad audience. Internet radio gives listeners access to many thousands, catering for very specific tastes, from the mainstream to the exotic," Cambridge representative Duncan Smith says.
"Combined with the large and growing installed base of broadband connections, I believe this market is poised to explode."
The Torian InFusion just received regulatory approval from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission last week, which means it is cleared for sale in the United States, and the company has already started selling units through its website for $230. Cambridge says it plans to license its design for a WiFi radio to any manufacturer interested in making one. More disruption for the radio market could be just around the corner.
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