Cell Phones Ready To Enter Radio’s Space
Cell Phones Ready To Enter Radio’s Space
For the past decade radio has been dealing with assaults from cable television, video games, the Internet, satellite radio, iPods and other sources of entertainment that has eroded the medium’s listenership. As technology improves and devices get smaller and more powerful, the next onslaught radio will face is from the ubiquitous cell phone and the race to impact the growing mobile music market.
Yesterday, Motorola introduced iRadio, a new service that will allow Internet radio to reach mobile phones. The iRadio technology fine-tunes existing media-ready mobile phones and allows them to record select Internet streams (XM, Sirius anyone?) when connected to a personal computer. Music from participating download services can also be transferred to iRadio ready phones. Once the phone leaves its PC dock, the contents can be listened to through headphones or through a car stereo system equipped with an iRadio Bluetooth adapter. Motorola also introduced a mobile phone that will store and play music, using Apple’s iTunes Music Player. iRadio trial versions will begin in a few months, with the fourth quarter of 2005 targeted for mass release.