Re: Streaming - Radio's New Transmitter and Tower

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: As a youth in the 70s in NW IL I lay in bed at night DXing to the 50000 watt clear channel stations whose call letters were printed on my AM radio dial; WGN, KDKA, WBZ ... : Latter on family vacations in N. WI I did the same with short-wave. : As an adult I now sit by my reciva and v-tuner based internet radios and sample the world. : As an adult in the telecom industry I write the cell phone network communications software which transmits data to cell phones allowing them to act both as phones and now, with blackberrys and iphones, as wireless computing devices including their streaming of various audio. : Internet and cell network delivery of streaming audio is the future, but we've a ways to go before todays handheld devices become yesterdays portable transistor radios. It takes a lot of battery power to keep a handheld wireless device in constant streaming contact with a cell network. It'll take beefed up cell networks to allow everyone to do this concurrently. Text packetized data(email, web pages) to your blackberry is one thing, streaming audio and video requires more resources. : I started listening to internet radio as an alternative when WGN hired Cochran 8? yrs ago. Too much talk about who he knows, golf and "humor" at others expense. : Internet radio allows me to: : 1) Listen to those who have left Chicago - Punnet : 2) Listen to stations I found while traveling - WPR ideas. : 3) Avoid local traffic and weather reports - one can't do anything about these anyway, they are a waste of broadcast time. : 4) Get the perspective of those in other countries; Canada, Australia, UK, India. Sadly I'm your typical american who only understands english. : 5) Listen on demand to subject matter podcasts; NPR shows, automotive shows, soccer shows. : 6) Avoid syndicated drek : 7) Avoid confrontational, shock and political radio(A few well balanced gems exist, Dumont on WLS). A side note: NBC TV is doing a day in the life of POTUS. I found OBama's reaction to political debate broadcasts interesting. Paraphrase - he doesn't listen, most are just doing their job, to insite people in one direction or another; to entertain. : 8) Find gems; alternatives to formulaic radio. : 9) Listen occasionally to the guilty pleasure of Coast-to-Coast at non night times of the day. Did I just loose all my credibility? It's just mindless entertainment to me, like all star wrestling was when I was 12 or baseball or football; we all pick up a copy of People Magazine now and again don't we? : 10) Due to rights restrictions, WGN plays entertaining reruns on the internet during Cubs broadcasts rather than games; I can choose to listen to AM and the cubs or listen to internet and reruns. Not sure how Metheny will impact that. : Other thoughts: : As the article suggests, I listen mostly to streaming of trad. terrestrial stations and podcasts produced by trad. radio organizations. I listen to some non radio podcasts in specialty fields. Over the past 6-8 yrs only a few internet-only stations have held my interest for any length of time they were folk, Hawaiian and Christmas music. : I have no interest in listening to streaming on my PC, I don't want to be tethered to the thing and it's lights and fans and point and click interfaces. I want a traditional radio like experience. Their are many internet radio devices which provide this but they are not well known to the general public yet. I own Sangean, Aluratek and Revo radios which allow me to listen. : Many broadcasters do not understand this. They broadcast using java based stream-the-world technology forcing their internet listeners to endure mandatory pop up windows with ads and non audio content they dictate. Some internet radios have problems with this. Other radio providers are bright and aware that alternatives exist; start internet listening sessions with internet-only audio commercials rather than pop up windows or provide backdoor mp3 and wma streams to the various internet radio databases.

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