Music In Your Car – Batch-Synced And Stored
With satellite radio, DMB, DAB and other technologies, companies are continuing to seek a way to deliver subscription-paid content to people on the go. XM and Sirius have had some success with their satellite-based approaches, but there are alternatives to over-the-air delivery of such content. I’m at the iHollywood conference today, and just got a demonstration of Motorola’s iRadio solution – at least the current iteration of it. The setup I saw used a Linux-based smartphone with Bluetooth connectivity which interacts with the car stereo. Audio content is stored on the phone (up to 10 hours) and the phone delivers it to the car audio system through a car base. Motorola provides the car base that plugs into the CD-changer connection plugs of many car stereo head-ends, thereby allowing the head-end to control the music and to display the meta data about the song being played. Of course, the phone can also play the audio outside the car through speakers or through a headset. And while the content is “commercial-free radio”, it is NOT delivered to the phone OTA – it is batch-synced at night (over home broadband) while the phone is plugged into the USB charging stand (connected to a PC). The demonstration was seamless, and made it look like this solution might actually fly. Plus it seems promising that the solution only asks the user to routinely do what is already done: plug your phone in at night.
