Internet Radio

[NewsStud]

Until then, OTA radio will be omnipresent and free, and internet radio will be subject to wifi availability, and will be limited by bandwidth costs.

Not really. A good many people now readily pay for mobile data on their cellphones. With newer vehicles, your car's audio system can connect your phone via bluetooth or tether.

I just bought a 2015. It's not a Bentley. It's an economy car. It's a base model. It's dashboard has a screen, and when my phone is bluetoothed-in, I can access not only music saved on my phone, but it can pipe through a streaming service. It even has a Pandora app on the screen that accesses Pandora on my phone. It plays the music and gives me title/artist/album info on the screen, all making use of my phone's connectivity.

Local broadcasters wanting to survive in this new world need to find a way to have their stations pop up on my car's screen next to Pandora. Whether the car pulls in the audio via a broadcast signal or a data stream doesn't matter to the listener.

 

[TheBigA]

Local broadcasters wanting to survive in this new world need to find a way to have their stations pop up on my car's screen next to Pandora.

Pandora is on the same platform as all the AM/FM radio platforms like IHeartRadio, Radio.com TuneIn.com, and everything else. So it's not that hard to do.

What will consumers do when the recording industry makes it impossible for Pandora and Spotify to offer free music channels? Because that's the direction we're going.

 

[umfan]

Continually streaming, even if its just audio, is a lot of data. Data plans are not unlimited. I agree that it can be done and some do it, but unless data plans become cheaper streaming is not a substitute for OTA radio.