Massificar as audiencias da rádio na net

«Cambridge Consultants is preparing to blow wide open the rapidly emerging global internet radio market with a new platform technology designed to massively undercut its competitors. The Cambridge Science Park-based firm believes the low-power internet radio’s sub-$15 (£7.60) electronic bill of materials (eBOM) will rewrite the economics of the sector and create a global market opportunity.
Recent research from radio audience tracker, Bridge Ratings, shows that one in five people in the US – almost 60 million residents – are listening to internet radio at least once a week, a figure that increased 40 per cent in the last year alone.
Head of consumer products at Cambridge Consultants, Duncan Smith, said: “Combined with the existing infrastructure of Wi-Fi and broadband, we believe that the internet radio market is poised to explode as soon as the right product price/performance point is achieved. The Iona platform more than meets that target.”
The Iona Wi-Fi portable radio is based on just two silicon chips and will be launched at CES 2007 in the US at the beginning of January.
Cambridge Consultants believes it could lead to consumer products retailing for around £25 to £30 – under half of most of today’s internet-ready ‘kitchen radio’ type products.
The radio technology is designed to operate without a PC and to be as accessible and easy to use as current portable FM radios.)(...)»

fonte: «Internet radio power play launched», Business Weekly, By Lautaro Vargas, 13 December 2006,

«Over the past year or so, however, there has been talk about a new take on another technology -- Internet radio -- that has the potential to disrupt both the world of satellite radio and good old terrestrial radio. It's called WiFi radio, or wireless Internet radio, and some say its time could be coming soon, thanks to cheaper radio chips and the increasing penetration of public wireless networks.

Internet radio has been around since the Web first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, thanks in large part to the development of the MP3 music-compression standard. When high-speed connections started to become commonplace, people began to share the songs they had downloaded, setting up what amounted to private radio networks with software such as Winamp.

Traditional radio stations also started streaming their music over the Web, and still do, although in many cases their ability to do so has been hampered by copyright regulations, which restrict what they can play over the Internet. (Unfortunately, the licensing agreements that allow radio stations to play songs on the radio don't always allow them to "broadcast" the same music over the Internet.)»