Wireless
Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US | Wireless
Submitted by johnh on October 17, 2004 - 22:05.
SoniqCast Aireo 2: 20GB MP3 player with built-in WiFi
I'm a radio person, so I don't really give a stuff about the 20Gb hard disk and the ability to spend money on ephemeral stuff that goes down the flusher at the first sign of a disk error - all that's in the realm of the rich kids as far as I'm concerned.
No, this is interesting because it has a Wifi adapter and can therefore stream internet radio. Sure, the number of places where you can wander around listening to your home town's breakfast show while abroad is limited *now*, but there's a clear trend developing.
Keep that spare eye on Wi-Max, and fer Chrissakes, if you've got money tied up in any company involved in DAB digital radio, get it the hell out.
For seven years now I've been boring people to death about this one, but here I go again because I'm right: eventually digital radio distribution will become a straight fight between
- DAB, where 'old' radio continues to make a long-term business plan out of spectrum scarcity. Where you'll never get more than 35 stations at a time, none of which you want to hear anyway. Where Capital FM and Heart own the airwaves.
- Portable internet radio delivered by 3G or WiMax or Satellite or whatever, where you can choose any radio station the hell you like from anywhere on earth. Where Des O'Connor FM - All Des, All The Time makes serious money because it owns all the Des fans in the world - while Capital FM is relegated to just one more of the 4500 available CHR stations on the dial. Where all the remaining financial impetus to waste spectrum on catering to common denominators is removed.
And in that straight fight to the death, digital radio is fucked in the first round.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
General | Webcasting | Webcasting: EU | Webcasting: US | Wireless
Submitted by johnh on October 6, 2004 - 13:41.
What the hell is this podcasting crap?
I was quietly ignoring it for weeks, secure in the knowledge that it was just Dave Winer plugging the enclosures feature of RSS 2 by other means (conveniently ignoring the fact that you can send encoded binary data in any XML format you like already by wrapping it in [CDATA] tags).
But today I see that the bullshit wagon is starting to get some traction - admittedly almost entirely at the hands of Winer and Adam-Curry-who-isn't-famous-unless-you're-over-35-and-American - with a couple of truly outrageous pieces of nonsense.
Exhibit A: A suspiciously-anonymous, wilful, pollution of Wikipedia. "They are published in an RSS 2.0 enclosure feed", no doubt because just downloading an MP3 won't work with an audio file. But the first line is just puke-inducing: "Podcasting is based on asynchronous bundles of passion". Wankers, wankers, wankers.
Exhibit B: Why Podcasting Will Save Radio. Get a fucking grip.
Let's set this straight for a minute.
-
If it's not live, it's not radio.
If you have to download 30Mb of data before you hear anything it's - at best - audio-on-demand.
-
If it's not instant, it's not radio.
Download it overnight to your iPod? "...and here's the news from yesterday. Get it while it's cold."
-
If only five people in the entire world are doing it and insisting all the while that you need a £400 piece of kit to play, it's not interesting.
(This, of course, being something it shares with Digital Radio, but I digress.) "iPod, iPod, iPod, we have large disposable incomes and we're big fish in our vanishingly-small micro-famous pond." Yawn. Welcome to BRN - the Bourgeois Radio Network. Call me back when someone's listening. But they won't be.
We've heard it all before:
"DTP enables anybody in the world to put out their own magazine." Or in other words, DTP enables anyone in the world to put out a butt-ugly photocopied pile of crap using every single font that came free with Microsoft Publisher. Having the tool does not mean you can design something and it does not mean you can write your way out of a paper bag.
"Self-publishing enables anybody in the world to publish their book." Self publishing enables anybody whose vanity matches the size of their wallet to print a book which nobody wants to read. There's a better-than-average chance that the publisher didn't want to print your book because your book sucks. Get over it.
And now we have "Podcasting [spit] enables anyone to produce their own radio programme." Whoopee-do. You mean I can spend 2 hours downloading an MP3 of someone with a nasally whine mumbling incoherently into a low-quality microphone while driving around in his car? Really? Can I?
Speech radio is NOT just about talking into a microphone. It's about communicating a message to people. It's about good writing far, far more than it's about having a 'good radio voice'. This stuff has neither.
It's not radio, people. It's like downloading a talking book. Except without the writing talent.
[sigh] On the plus side this thing *might* have something going for it in the ongoing battle to 'save radio'. While the ego-ridden rich kids are concentrating on this little successor to Pointcast and its provenly-failed ilk, it means that they're opting out of the real future of broadcasting, where a million stations bloom without the restriction on frequencies inherent in the old model, and the best programming gets the biggest audiences. And if that means they won't be getting their goo all over our thing, so much the better.
More on the real story tomorrow. I've got a piece in the works due in by then.
read more | 1 comment | delicious | digg | reddit
3G | General | Webcasting | Wireless
Submitted by johnh on July 21, 2004 - 03:59.
First, there was Kerbango. Kerbango was - is still - the most desirable gadget I ever saw (iPod? Get stuffed). Looks fantastic, attach it to a CAT5 cable and you can listen to 10,000+ MP3/Real/whatever-format internet radio stations. No PC required.
Kerbango never made it to market. Everybody who saw a prototype wanted one rightfuckingnow but they couldn't match their $399 target or make enough or whatever the problem was. They got bought by 3Com shortly before Dotcomland went the way of Atlantis before it, where it got chucked into the same consumer category as the Audrey and they perished together.
Time passed.
Much, much more time passed.
And now, Linksys has a new product. Linksys the 3Com subsidiary has a new product. It does the boring play-MP3s-from-your-Windows-box rubbish that all the cool kids with arse-elbow identification deficiency like.
But. It also plays MP3 streams, Windows Media streams and RealMedia streams without a PC. And it has an Ethernet port. And it has a built-in 11Kbps WiFi network interface.
They've built a new Kerbango. They've given it a dumb name - WMLS11B - but they've made a new Kerbango.
This time it also does WMA.
This time it also does wireless.
And this time, IT ONLY COSTS EIGHTY QUID.
You need one of these in your life. I need one of these in my life. Everyone needs one of these in her life.
Colleagues, I'm not wrong about this, and you read it here first. This is the first nail in broadcast radio's coffin. This is yet another nail in DAB's coffin. This is the beginning of the end for geographically-restricted radio and all the crappy programming which goes with it, because if they can make this for £80, the portable comes next, and after that comes the portable with a 3G modem adapter for the car and flat-rate data biling.
And, four years after Kerbango got the chop, it's about bloody time. w0000!
read more | 1 comment | delicious | digg | reddit
Wireless
Submitted by johnh on June 11, 2003 - 22:11.
Pubs with wifi broadband are *such* a spiffing idea that I\'ve set up a link to my local from the flat. It\'s open. Channel 1. Some security measures apply. Other than that, enjoy... it gets its external connection tomorrow.
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
Wireless
Submitted by johnh on December 3, 2002 - 20:04.
4 more locations in the T-Mobile/Starbucks trial:
1 Cowcross Place, EC1 (right next to Farringdon tube)
65 Fenchurch Street, EC3 (yeah, Fenchurch Street station's nearby. duh)
60 Wardour Street, W1 in Soho (first one in the West End - yay!)
and for the provincial hordes: 125 Colmore Row, Lloyds Building, Birmingham.
And yes - they're still all free. Apparently they've got little T-Mobile signs in the window and the AP name (if you're not able to autodiscover) is 'T-Mobile'.
read more | 1 comment | delicious | digg | reddit
Wireless
Submitted by johnh on November 1, 2002 - 15:02.
T-Mobile isn't able to charge for its new node-access-in-Starbucks service yet, on account of there only being two nodes in the whole country. Which, if you'd paid
read more | delicious | digg | reddit
