Thank you for coming to NPR, James! We really liked your talk. The day after your presentation our interns at NPR showed us their Intern edition show. Many of us remembered you. Is this how radio will be, sound, look like? Here’s the link: http://www.npr.org/internedition/fall09/

Laura Soto-Barra
NPR Senior Librarian

Always struck me as a little odd the way that Mobile Operators have mostly ignored Radio in all its forms – Nokia’s Visual Radio aside, and most of us know how that ended up.

However, surely this can’t be the end game – what will it take to help them realise that is is A Service ™ that their subscribers want? either by supplying phones with FM, Digital Radio support, or by having some sort of business conscious view of streaming IP radio.

Does anyone see a possibility of a partnership with major IP broadcasters in the form of an advertising revenue share – or perhaps even the networks waking up to value added services like injecting adverts via something like RadioVIS?

However much I’d like to use my apps to listen to radio stations from all over the planet, I understand why operators would want to control the amount of traffic over their networks. And of course, that it cannot be a good business decision to give this away for “free” (data included bla bla bla).

I sincerely hope that mobile phone manufacturers offer both analog and digital receivers in future models, maybe along the lines of iPod Nano where you can pause live radio.

[...] fortjener egentlig et spørsmålstegn på slutten, for dødsdommen er på ingen måte avsagt. Radioguru James Cridland har dog bragt frem gode poenger som kan vise at mobilnettet ikke er best egnet for [...]

@Ben – Mobile phone manufacturers haven’t been ignoring radio: Nokia, Sony amongst others have bundled radios with even their cheapest phones for years.

And just look at this Sony phone: http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/r306?cc=in&lc=en#view=overview – AM, FM, RDS and radio recording

@Stuart – you’re right of course – some of the big Manufacturers have been putting radios in their phones, although I would argue they still probably aren’t using it to its fullest (think James blogged on that subject in an earlier post).

My slightly overdone complaint was that the Mobile *Operators* weren’t engaged in the value of radio – and its obvious they are a key player in the desire to stream over mobile data services (re: Some explicit Ts&Cs forbidding streaming).

What would be great is if a Mobile Operator boosted the range of handsets capable of receiving broadcast audio (probably by poking those handset manufacturers that aren’t bundling them with their devices – Apple).

Then, they could bundle some nice Radio app with phones sold on their network, possibly made fancier with something like RadioVIS (sorry, another shameless plug).