Half-baked tethering from RadioTime and BMW

(image from Wired.com)
OK, so by now you know me. Internet radio in the car is my passion. However, I am also pretty busy and way too practical. I still drive the 2002 PT Cruiser I bought in December 2001 because it runs just fine, thank you very much. (Let's forget about the fact that it needed a new transmission after only 36,000 miles ... ) The result of this practicality is that when I get in the car, I generally just sit down and go. Even though it would only add less than a minute to my departure, most times I don't take the time to get out my iPhone and connect it to the iPod adapter. It is far easier for me to just hit the power button on the radio and listen to our local NPR affiliate, KPCC, so that's what usually happens.

If I, someone who is really motivated to get Internet radio in the car, don't take the time, should we expect others to do the same? Well, when I check around I find that I am not alone in this behavior. People want convenience and will generally take the easy path.

So, now we get to the RadioTime announcement. What bills itself to be an innovation and a "first" is just another half baked attempt to put Internet radio into the car. Similar to the Pioneer AVIC announcement with Pandora earlier this year, users can connect their iPhone to the car and use the Mini's dashboard controls to tune Internet radio. While both solutions do have the benefit of using the in-dash controls to access Internet radio, helping usability, they still fail because they require the user to connect their iPhone. Just like impressions on the second page of Google search results or clicks below the fold, the drop off rate on usage due to this requirement will be huge. People will do it the first couple weeks, but then they will forget one time, then another time, and soon the feature will go unused. Then the iPhone connector in the car will get old and will not be compatible with their new iPhone for next year. The net result will be that they wasted their money buying a feature that they only enjoyed for a couple weeks.

As such, until Internet radio is truly integrated into the dash, it will not take the place of FM radio or even satellite radio in the car. Integration doesn't mean just controls. It means controls and connectivity. It has to be truly built in and "just work."

Until you can sit down, power on, drive off, and enjoy your favorite Internet radio, it isn't viable competition for the user's time in the car.

Only now they get it?

Through the blinding Internet blizzard that surrounded CES 2010, an interesting article caught my eye. Someone decided to downgrade the Sirius XM stock because of the announcement by Pioneer to integrate control of Pandora's iPhone app into their new line of AVIC navigation products.

I find this fascinating, not because people are seeing finally Internet radio as serious competition to satellite radio (I will temporarily ignore the fact that Pandora is a jukebox and not actually "radio"), but because it took a $1200 navigation system to make them see it. Folks have been able to integrate their mobile phones into their cars for nearly 4 years now, at the cost of a mere $10 for the cassette adapter or even less for a 1/8" stereo cable if they already had an AUX jack. If someone really wanted to go wild, they could splurge $50 for a more complete kit that included a power adapter.

So what's going on here? The answer, methinks, is integration and interface. Once we can use Internet radio in the car seamlessly, it becomes real. The solution by Pioneer, though, is still only a step in the right direction. The label "radio"comes with a specific user experience expectation...

Power on, turn the knob, and music comes out.

Sirius XM in the car delivers that experience. Internet radio in the car still does not. Once it does, then it will be a viable comptetitor to other forms of radio in the car. The good news is that we are almost there. Soon the perfect storm of integration, UI, and affordable connectivity will make Internet radio a truly viable alternative for in-car entertainment.

Solid service on I-75 in Atlanta

Visiting Atlanta multiple times recently, I have had great success with Tuner2 Internet radio on iPhone each time. Most recently, my rental was some kind of "crossover" vehicle from Chrysler with absolutely no headroom. However, it did have the requisite AUX jack, so I plugged in and listened contentedly getting to my meetings around the city. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though, AT&T makes its home in Atlanta, so I would hope that in their home city, they would be solid. (Of course, we have seen home town apathy before...)

Side note, during a brief sojourn onto the FM dial, I heard a commercial from Comcast. In Atlanta, are offering their High-Speed 2go (awkward spelling) bundling 4G, 3G, and home cable into a single bill. $50/month for the cable + 4G, $70/month for cable + 4G + 3G for roaming. Pretty good pricing. Of course, it is only available in a couple cities so far.

Stinky Steers Suppliment Stinky Signal

More local reporting. I continue to be amazed that AT&T has such poor signal down the I-5 corridor. Folks may say it is "just me," but as I drove by the feed lots north of Coalinga, the signal was still a typical jumpy mess. Sometimes, it even read "no service," meaning no voice or data! After about 20 minutes of trying to let it find a stable spot, I gave up and went back to iPod. For those who might think that it is just the car, that seems highly unlikely. I have had the same results in a PT Cruiser and a Toyota Sienna - two vehicles with what I have to imagine are very different EM profiles.

Let's see if AT&T can improve this highly trafficked corridor.

Flash streaming on iPhone?

Yes, you read the headline right, and it is true. Modulation Index, the folks that have been making radio stations sound better for over 30 years, has released a new version of their Internet radio player on Apple iPhone that supports audio streaming using Flash on iPhone.

So, why is that important? Because it solves three problems: audio quality and reliability, economy of scale, and interactivity.

Problem 1 is audio quality & reliability. Quality is determined by two factors, audio quality per bit and transport overhead. Today, the vast majority of what you hear on iPhone is MP3 over Shoutcast. Some folks have found a way to get HE AAC v1 over Shoutcast using the iPhone built-in decoder. But to get a reliable listening experience on iPhone while driving, you can't send your stream at more than 32Kbps. 24Kbps is even better. And as much as I love HE AAC v1, taking it down to 32Kbps is pushing it (and MP3 at 32Kbps sounds like garbage.) That means you need HE AAC v2, which is only possible if your iPhone app licenses a good codec from a reliable source. (Don't get me started on the low-quality of FAAD2.) That solved the codec problem, but the transport issue was still there. I also love Shoutcast, but it was never intended as a mobile streaming protocol. It works great when the connection is relatively reliable, but it frays at the edges when you get dropouts. HE AAC v2 delivered over RTMP, the Flash Media Server protocol, addresses both issues. You get a high-quality codec delivered on a reliable transport. A solid sound that will make the most demanding station GM proud. Problem 1 solved.

Problem 2 is economy of scale. Even though mobile streaming is becoming popular, it still doesn't have the cume of desktop listeners. That means stations had to either set up a separate server to reach mobile or they had to shoehorn their PC stream. Now that Flash streaming with HE AAC v2 is availble on iPhone, stations don't have to choose. They can have a single stream to serve Windows, Mac, and iPhone, reducing overhead and mangement requirements. It also means that stations can pick from a wider variety of CDNs, giving them control over their own destiny. Problem 2 solved.

Problem 3 is interactivity. As much as it might offend the purists (most of the time, I think I fall into that camp,) radio stations need visuals and interactivity to help differentiate Internet radio. By supporting the Flash streaming protocol and establishing a format for advertising and albumart metadata, the Modulation Index solution gives stations the ability stream album art with clickable "buy now" links as well as synchronized graphics for audio ads, again with click-through on iPhone, on Windows, and on Mac. Problem 3 solved.

The barriers keep falling and the industry is evolving ever more mature solutions to make Internet radio a real business. Given that we are 10 years into this endeavor, I am glad to see it.

Funny Culture of Free

Walk with me for a moment and consider the following...

Imagine you are a person interested in HD Radio radio (a bit far fetched, I know, but stick with me). You have heard stations in your area talk about their great digital quality on HD Radio and their additional programming choices on HD2 and HD3, and you want to hear it. So you go into Best Buy and head to the car audio section. You see a nice HD Radio receiver and take it over to the counter. The person scans it and says, "$99 plus tax please." "$99? What a deal!"

You also happen to have an iPhone. You visit the app store and see two Internet radio players. One is free but uses old codecs (or pirated open-source codecs) and won't stream anything but the most rudamentary formats. The other costs a few bucks but has professional grade audio quality and supports the wide variety of content formats out there. Which one do you choose? The free one, of course! Because Internet radio should be free, right? Even if it sounds crappy, it is better to be free and crappy than cost a couple bucks and sound good.

What is wrong with this picture? The person is willing to pay for a limited piece of hardware that gives them access to only 30 new low-quality broadcasts that may not even come in clearly where they live, but they are not willing to pay a couple of bucks to get a well crafted piece of software that gives them quality access to 100s and 1000s of stations across the Web.

Let us walk some more and consider this next scenario..

You are the GM of a major broadcast radio station. Your boss at headquarters is all excited about HD Radio, so you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to convert your station to HD even though you know there are more transmitters than radios in the market. People want choice, people want digital quality, so even though HD Radio gives you neither, you do it because HD is the "salvation of broadcast radio." During this process, you scream at your engineers because unless they tweak the HD signal just right, it impacts the quality of your analog FM. And if you have learned only one thing in your career, its that quality is critical.

Soon after, some funny thingamajig called an iPhone comes out. In a short time, nearly 50 million people have this iPhone or its slightly deprived younger brother, the iPod touch. Your boss hears the buzz again and says "get us on the iPhone." You call up the professionals and they say "you should use the modern MPEG-4 HE AAC v2 codec over Flash Media Server or 3GPP. That way you can have high-fidelity sound and reliable delivery to all those iPhone listeners." But after seeing their relatively modest price quote for the encoder or the iPhone software, you say "no way!" The Internet is cheap and the Internet is free. Why should I spend money to stream on the Web and to iPhones? It's not as important as my broadcast signal, so I can cut corners. So to save a couple thousand bucks, you use "free" streaming tools and low fidelity codecs to stream to the iPhone, giving your listeners ear fatigue and and continuous drop outs.

What is wrong with this picture? This GM is willing to spend a huge sum of money to chase the HD Radio wild goose and flames his engineers over FM quality issues but is unwilling to spend a couple thousand bucks to give his listeners a high-quality experience over what is the future of his station - the 500M streaming-ready mobile phones already in the market.

The moral of the story.

The free culture of the Internet is going to kill itself eventually. People get what they pay for. Radio Paradise and SomaFM are only here because their listeners love them enough to pay and support them. Ad supported Internet radio is only here because people listen to and act on the advertising. Adobe Flash CS4 is only around because enough people pay for it.

The irony is that many times people pay for stuff that is crappy and snub paying for stuff that is good, just because they think that everything on the Internet should be free. I am using HD Radio as an example, just because it is easy to knock, but the same faulty logic is being applied to any physical vs. virtual purchase. People are willing to pay $8 for a latte and a muffin, but they gripe at an $8 iPhone app. What's up with that?

Bottom line: if nobody pays, then nothing will get produced.

As the Internet evolves, I hope that quality cheap trumps crappy free because people are willing to pay a little for quality. The world will be a much sweeter sounding place.

Adjusting the signal

The other day I was driving and I noticed a change in my behavior. On my way to a regular destination, I chose to go a different route. Not really longer, just different. Turns out my reasoning was to avoid a hole in the 3G coverage that I noticed awhile back. I have become seriously attached to my Radio Paradise sessions in the car and I don't want to miss anything, even while running errands. My mental routing engine knows that and plans accordingly.

Internet radio in the car has now become part of my subconscious pattern. Radio has become visceral again, part of my life. I like that.