Reinventing Radio

I have been working on a simple streaming radio station project. In the process, I thought about the whole satellite radio thing.

Some speculation: what happens when wireless data access is good enough that it can be integrated into consumer products such as portable radios? There are some UI considerations, but what if Live365 was available on your car's stereo?

A while back, Nextel was testing the "wireless broadband" service in our area, and I was fortunate enough to try it. I really liked it. When reading the documentation, I noticed the curious admonition that I shouldn't use it while operating a moving vehicle. Of course, I then had to do just that to see why.

It still is not clear to my why they told me to not use it while driving my car, but I can say that it worked. It was cool to be able to drive around with a laptop streaming internet radio.

My guess is that we will be able to do that at some point with edge phones that connect to our bluetooth car stereo system. It should be interesting, since it is actually quite easy to set up a streaming service. I can see very focused regional broadcasters that otherwise couldn't be supported in traditional broadcasting.

--hal