 A BREAKDOWN OF LIMITING FACTORS FOR INTERNET RADIO ON MOBILE PHONES ·Mar 21, 11:06 AM by Ralph Sledge One way around these limitations is using the streaming method put forth by TVersity (which is what WMFU uses), FlyTunes and Musicradio.com. This method exploits a quirk in the Quicktime player on the iPhone, which allows for continuous streaming of a file that’s being written to on the fly. You’re limited to the spartan Quicktime interface —no song info, no visual ads, etc. — though you could probably rig up something to allow people to look at past songs. You still can’t browse the web at the same time you’re listening to music with this approach, but it appears you can do almost everything else — email, text, etc. Also highly anticipated, Google’s Android SDK is less limited, but since there is no actual hardware for Android yet, it’s impossible to say what the actual limitations might be. It’s also unknown if Flash for Android will be a possibility. Windows-based mobile phones (and Palm devices) don’t necessarily have all the limitations of the iPhone SDK either, but they’re more difficult to develop for, and a lot of the things that are allowed don’t really work well. Palm devices probably tend to be better in this regard than all but the fastest Windows mobile devices. Microsoft recently announced that a version of Flash Lite will be available for future phones (in RAIN, here), though they don’t give any solid information (Flash Lite is a stripped-down version of the popular Flash video and audio streaming method designed for the desktop/notebook platform). It’s also unclear whether or not Flash Lite is a good streaming solution; from the looks of it, the only thing it can actually stream are FLV (Flash video) files from a Flash server, which might not be a cost-effective solution for most. Microsoft also intends to make a version of its Silverlight (Microsoft’s own Flash-like technology) available for phones at the same time. So far as I know, there isn’t much information about the capabilities of mobile Silverlight. It seems to come down to this: most likely, in order for Internet radio on a phone to be truly compelling, people would need to be able to listen and do other Furthermore, it’s not terribly likely that someone is going to come out with a phone that will be designed for this in the near future, for the same reason that no one has come out with a full-featured phone that gives you 12 hours of talk time, or a laptop that runs for 12 hours while you’re listening to music and watching video: the power/battery ratio just doesn’t exist yet. So while it’s exciting that companies are coming out with phones that have more capable software, there’s also a hardware problem that has to be overcome: phones have to be made more efficient before they’re able to run their cell networks, a third-party program, and their base operating software all at the same time for more than handful of hours. Ralph Sledge is the lead software developer for AccuRadio. share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
Comment Other stories RAIN 9/2: Apple makes iTunes experience more social, more "radio-like" RAIN 9/1: FilterMusic.net excels at helping you discover new streams RAIN 8/31: Pandora's Les Hollander to speak at RAIN Summit East RAIN 8/30: Former Forrester analyst to deliver second keynote of RAIN Summit East RAIN 8/27: Radio vet Bill Gamble to consult AccuRadio's country stations RAIN 8/26: Clear Channel's digital chief Evan Harrison to leave at end of year RAIN 8/25: Pandora spotlights improved "genre-based" listening options RAIN 8/24: NAB presents details of proposed royalty settlement to members RAIN 8/23: Mobile media growth will even outpace Internet, predicts Nielsen RAIN 8/20: New deadline for Internet Radio Awards is August 31 |
possibility of an Internet radio application less compelling than many had previously though. The biggest: initially, it looked as if it wasn’t designed to allow “background” processes on the iPhone. In other words, you couldn’t be listening to Internet radio and doing something else (texting, emailing, web browsing, etc.). Using the 
things at the same time. No phone currently on the market is going to be designed to handle this, because no phone’s battery would last more than 1-4 hours in such a scenario. 
