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.

More motion in the Mojave.

Another month, another trip to Las Vegas. This time to NAB. The best news is that the Tuner2 app for iPhone is now complete, so I got to test the release version across the desert. Being my third time this year (CES, CTIA, and now NAB), I have been able to compare the relative performance of Internet radio on my iPhone across the Mojave desert. Interestingly, each time has been better.

There is still a gap for about 40 miles after Ft. Irwin towards Baker on I-15. However, outside of that gap, it is 3G streaming all the way! I was able to tune into Radio Paradise up the Cajon Pass without a hitch. Starting south of Baker (well before the famous Zzyzx Road), I was able to jam all the way to Las Vegas with only minor breaks a couple times in the deepest parts of the desert. It appears that AT&T is constantly improving their network.

One caveat, (and maybe a minor bit of bragging), you won't get this kind of performance from just any Internet radio app on iPhone. You need one that has a persistent retry mechanism and one that has a high-quality MPEG-4 aacPlus decoder. With those two features, a 24Kbps stream sounds great through your speakers and rides through the bandwidth sags without audible rebuffering. Most of the iPhone apps that claim support for aacPlus (aka HE AAC, AAC+, etc.) use the open source FAAD2 decoder. That decoder has very poor performance and sounds terrible at low bit rates. (Personally, I don't think it even sounds that good at 64Kbps.) Since the Tuner2 iPhone app uses the commercial FhG decoder and the Modulation Index reconnect scheme, the audio quality and reliability are very high.

With all this talk about the desert, I don't want to forget to mention that the app still performs like a champ all around the LA metro area, delivering an experience superior to either satellite or HD Radio. Now that aacPlus is finally starting to show up in iPhone apps, car listening reliability will pass through the critical threshold for a broad audience. Pandora and AOL Radio still use 64Kbps MP3 on the go, so their audio quality in the car is marginal both on the decode and on the bandwidth usage. Once stations start to use 32Kbps MPEG-4 aacPlus, Internet radio in the car will really start to come into its own.