New products aim to make Internet radio more portable
By Sam Diaz
Knight Ridder News Service
| • | Net radio products
Replay Radio Schedules recordings of radio programs, burns to CDs or transfers to a mobile device Cost: $30 On the Web: Radio YourWay Portable AM/FM radio receiver allows recording of live radio broadcasts to flash-memory drive Cost: 32-megabyte, $150; 128-megabyte, $200 On the Web: |
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Wait just a minute, the DJs told her. The station is streaming over the Internet. It doesn't matter if the move is to Boston or Bangalore. Her favorite radio show is only a click away.
Internet radio isn't new — it just got lost under a shadow of controversy when Napster, MP3s and file-sharing programs kept everyone guessing, posturing and lobbying over royalties and what was legal and what wasn't.
Internet radio — streaming audio — offers wide variety, and you're not limited to the range of broadcast radio waves. But it lacks something: Listeners are tied to their computers. You can't take it with you.
"What's key to radio is mobility," said Jeffrey Yorke, spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C. "Not everyone is going to tote around a laptop and Wi-Fi to listen to the radio. The question is how do you get Internet radio in the car or in the boombox?"
A new wave of technology is bringing portability to Internet radio and may spark another round of discussions about fair use, copyright and royalties.
The developers at Applian Technologies in San Francisco think the best way to go portable is to record a radio program and burn it to CD or transfer to a mobile device. They've developed a $30 software product that can make that happen.
Replay Radio (www.replay-radio.com) not only allows listeners of streaming radio to instantly record the streaming audio with a click of the mouse, but also allows users to schedule recordings of favorite programs that stream.
Let's say you're a big fan of Casey Kasem's Weekly Top 40 countdown but it airs at 6 a.m. Sundays. Replay Radio — which has Kasem's countdown on its list of popular shows — will automatically record that show and save it to the hard drive as an MP3 file, or whichever format you prefer.
Same thing if you're a National Public Radio fan and retrieve something from its archives but don't want to sit at the computer to listen.
You can listen when you're ready, either on the computer or transfer it to an MP3 player or CD.
But is it legal?
Tom Mayes, vice president of sales at Applian, says it's just as legal as recording TV show on a VCR to watch later.
"All of this is free radio," he said. "There's really no reason there should be a conflict with someone recording it."
In fact, some stations have asked Mayes to post a streaming link or list specialty programs in the software database. It's more attractive to radio advertisers, Mayes said, because their commercials can not only be heard by anyone around the world, but also can be heard at any time of day.
But those are recorded feeds streaming over the Internet. What about live radio over the air?
Radio YourWay, made by PoGo Products, is a portable AM/FM radio receiver with a feature that allows recording of live radio broadcasts to a built-in flash-memory drive. It only works with local broadcast range for over-the-air broadcasts.
The product, which is sold in 32-megabyte or 128-megabyte versions for $150 and $200, respectively, stores voice recordings and radio broadcasts as MP3 files and comes with a USB port for uploading the recordings to a computer.
That might not seem like a lot of space, but 32 megabytes is four hours of recording of lower-quality AM radio, which is home to sports and news talk shows.
The timer allows users to record a favorite show by time and station — usually regularly scheduled programs such as Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern — or make an instant recording, maybe of a new song just hitting the airwaves.
Not to be outdone, Ibiquity Digital in Maryland is developing software that will not only record a broadcast but will also add TiVo-like capabilities such as pausing or rewinding the programming — possibly for broadcast radio in the car or streaming radio in the home.
"It's not something you would use to pirate and send out," said Ibiquity spokesman David Salemi. "This is more about how the radio is used."
Radios with the technology built in aren't expected for at least a year.
It's not clear whether these technologies will create more battles over copyrights and royalties — but the companies involved in the technology seem to think streaming radio and time-shifting capabilities will be attractive to radio stations — and their advertisers.
