Thursday, April 7, 2005

So I was over at Mark Cuban's blog today reading about the death of the CD. I agree with Mark that things are moving to a place where people don't want to buy CD's so they can then rip them to MP3 files on a computer and then turn around copy them to a MP3 player. But I also would like to avoid the whole owning part of the process. When it comes down to it all I really want to do is listen to some music. It's not all that important to me that I own it, and these days you never really own it you are just given permission to listen to it on 5 or fewer computers, or a portable player that supports the appropriate DRM standards. Recently I've started building my own radio schedule. I've been trying out RadioTime which is a software and service that allows me to schedule recording of Internet streaming audio to MP3 files. I have also set up some subscriptions to a variety of Podcasts using iPodder. RadioTime turns on early in the morning and records the morning show from Radio Orion in the Czech Republic, as well as the first hour of the morning show on the local community radio station 88.5 WMNF. Then it records Morning Becomes Eclectic from KCRW in Santa Monica. Each morning I download a variety of podcasts and recorded radio broadcasts to my portable MP3 player and I have plenty of audio entertainment for my day. Back to Mark Cuban, I sent Mark a note describing the Streaming Internet Receiver concept, assuming my email would get sucked into the black hole of unsolicited mail that Mark must receive, but instead he sent me a reply, like 15 minutes later! He had the same concerns I get from everyone I mention this to. Streams aren't reliable, the sound quality sucks, you can't get them everywhere. Yes I know streams aren't the best but they keep getting better, and once we get high speed broadband wireless service going everywhere I predict they will be good enough to make my dream of a portable wireless enabled media device that can access audio and video from the Inkernets possible and people will start to understand. So what shows up in my Kratochwill PubSub search tonight but this old item where I talked about the Streaming Internet Receiver with Jim from Whole Wheat Radio. I keep hoping that if I keep talking about this that someday it will actually happen. 8:28:13 PM

© Copyright 2006 Rod Kratochwill.