August 11th, 2006 by Justin Oberman
The blogosphere is buzzing with news about how Alltel Wireless the owner/operator of the nation’s largest wireless network has just announced the signing of a deal with satellite radio broadcaster XM Radio to create “XM Radio Mobile”.
The thinking is the newly created entity, XM Radio Mobile will initially bring 20 channels of satellite content to a variety of compatible handsets for $7.99 per month. XM will push out data to include the song title, artist and album. Genres in the initial release are likely to include music from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, Top 20 Hits, Alternative Rock, Hip-Hop/R&B, Indie Rock, Blues, Country, Latin and more.
But to tell you the truth it exactly the future capabilities of cell phones and network infrastructures such as 3G EV-DO and HSDPA not to mention 4G innovations such Wimax and city-wide and municipal Wifi that I think may make an infrastructure like pay for satellite radio irrelevant in the near future.
Don’t get me wrong. I get the convenience of having all the technology on one device. But as more and more handsets are dual mode wifi and network friendly and as such things as Wimax and or municipal wifi become a reality I am betting that the often overlooked services like commercial free home grown or professional internet radio (which is big in social networking worlds like Second Life) will be more widely used and available. I can also see certain networks make deals with Internet radio stations (or a company that owns a bunch) to have them on the deck or as a premium service.
In other-words wifi and wimax will become the new way to stream commercial free or just plain old free radio. This will also cause a boom in the home-grown radio market where anyone can have their own radio station. Hey I am just looking to the future here.
It will also become an easier way to distribute podcasts.
I see that satellite radio sees this to and that is probably why this deal was made. And there is no question that Alltel XM users will use it, for now. The question is whether they will in the future if IP radio streaming to mobile handsets ever makes it off the ground, which I predict it will.
