Internet radio

Lightning Review: Slacker G2 Portable Radio

The Gadget: Slacker G2, a slimmer, updated version of the original Slacker portable internet radio player. The Price: $200 for 25-station 4GB, and $250 for the 40-station 8GB unit. The free service is ad-supported and allows six skips per hour, while the premium service costs about $10/month and is ad-free, offers unlimited skips and the…

Slacker Internet Radio Comes to BlackBerry for Lazy-Ass Music Lovers

Slacker, the Pandora-esque internet radio service, will release a free app for BlackBerry phones next month. It’s remarkably similar to their own hardware—users choose pre-programmed stations or build their own, and songs are downloaded directly to the phone’s memory card, so they don’t require Wi-Fi or a cell connection to play. Telling Slacker what songs…

Microsoft Working on “Vi-Fi”: Brings Seamless Internet and VoIP to Vehicles

As if you didn’t already spend enough time on the internet, Microsoft is looking to feed your addiction even further by developing a reliable “Vi-Fi” system for automobiles. The major problem that must be overcome is the fact that current Wi-Fi networks suffer hiccups in service as you pass through. This is especially true when…

Pandora Internet Radio Can’t Take Royalty Rates, Will Likely Close the Box

Pandora, the internet radio station built around your tastes, will probably be going out of business soon. After getting slapped by the CRB with exorbitantly high royalty rates to continue playing music, founder Tim Westergren says the company is facing a “pull-the-plug” situation. There’s one congressman trying to help Pandora and it’s million plus users,…

Lightning Review: Aluratek Wi-Fi Internet Radio Alarm Clock

The Gadget: A Wi-Fi internet radio alarm clock from Aluratek, with over 11,000 free stations worldwide. The Price: $199. The Verdict: I actually like this thing a lot despite its laundry list of flaws—it’s a bread-and-butter gadget that mostly works as advertised. It’s got more radio stations than you could possibly ever listen to, from…

Iona Radio Cube Means You Physically Flip Through Stations

This Wi-Fi radio concept design from Cambridge Consultants is a rubber-edged plastic cube. Four of the sides are assigned your four favorite stations via a web interface (maybe some of you have more, but frankly, I think four about covers it for me). The minute some annoying commercial or crap song starts playing, you just…

Slacker Streaming Net Radio Player Limited Trial Units In the Wild

We just talked to the guys at Slacker who told us that they’ve offered trial test units to people who’ve pre-ordered. Here’s our hands-on video from November in case you wanted to see what the thing was all about. [Slacker] https://gizmodo.com/slacker-portable-personalized-radio-player-video-and-ga-323023

Everyone now and then, politicians do offer a glimmer of hope: Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) wag their fingers at SoundExchange for using royalty negotiations as leverage to push DRM on webcasters. [Ars Technica] https://gizmodo.com/internet-radio-may-survive-but-only-with-lots-of-drm-278801

SoundExchange Possibly Overstepping Its Bounds With Illegal Lobbying

It looks like internet radio’s favorite fee-collection organization, SoundExchange, might be playing hard and fast with legal limits on how it can spend collected money. Not on the list of three kosher uses (full legal mumbo-jumbo post-jump) is lobbying and PR. But Listening Post’s Eliot Van Buskirk noticed that it appears to be engaged in…

Internet Radio May Survive, But Only With Lots of DRM

The imminent death of internet radio due to unreasonable licensing and fee hikes might not be so imminent, at least as long as radio stations are willing to pile the DRM onto their streams as demanded by SoundExchange. Wanting to end the practice of “streamripping,” the equivalent of the fair-use-sanctioned practice of taping songs off…

Tivoli Audio Introduces NetWorks and NetWorksGo Wi-Fi Internet Radios

Today in New York, Tivoli Audio founder Tom DeVesto unveiled plans, what he called “five years worth of work,” for two Internet radios modeled after the company’s successful Kloss Model One and SongBook radios. The Kloss Model One look-alike will be called NetWorks, and the SongBook-styled one, shown above, will be the NetWorksGo. Price has…

Attention DC-Area Giz Readers: SaveNetRadio Rally Tonight

Bored on a Monday night in our nation’s capital? Tonight you can stop on by Upper Senate Park at Constitution and Delaware Avenues at around 6:30pm for a rally to save Internet radio from destitution at the hands of the money-hungry Copyright Royalty Board. If you haven’t kept up with the controversy but you do…

Pandora Hits Sprint Phones and Sonos Remotes

Right at this moment, a bunch of music fans are sitting in rows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, eagerly awaiting the fate of Pandora, the cult-hit semi-customizable Internet radio service. What are they about to hear? That Pandora is teaming up with Sprint and Sonos to get into mobile and…

Senate Introduces Net-Radio Bill; Pandora Asks Giz Readers to Keep Bugging Congress

The Senate today introduced a bill to prevent outlandish increases in net-radio royalties, a companion to the bill proposed by the House of Representatives last month. I decided to check in with Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren again to see how he and his fellow webcasters got such sudden political clout. https://gizmodo.com/proposed-house-bill-kills-internet-radio-royalty-rate-h-256003 “Congress is calling this…

SoundExchange Collects Internet Radio Royalties for Every Artist, Even Non-Members

Amidst the uproar over the egregious royalty rate hike for internet radio stations, engineered by RIAA-spinoff SoundExchange and handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board, we missed a detail we should have noticed. Some commenters suggested simply listening to music under non-restrictive licenses. But apparently that won’t work. https://gizmodo.com/yet-another-reason-to-boycott-the-riaa-241376 “The recent U.S. Copyright Office ruling…

Proposed House Bill Kills Internet Radio Royalty Rate Hike

A new bill in the House sponsored by Reps. Jay Inslee and Donald Manzullo, dubbed the “Internet Radio Equality Act,” would neuter the CRB’s much-maligned royalty rate hike, setting rates at 7.5 percent of revenue—the same rate satellite radio broadcasters are charged. The new rate would be in effect from 2006 to 2010 and would…

Pandora Co-Founder Gives Two Reasons Why Royalty Decision Sucks

We asked Pandora‘s co-founder, Tim Westergren, if he would like to discuss the decision of the Library of Congress’s Copyright Royalty Board to uphold its decision to charge new crippling rates to Web-based broadcasters like Pandora. Tim responded: “I think there are two main points that would be great to make, both regarding dangerous perceptions…

Internet Radio Rebellion Crushed: CRB Upholds Royalty Rate Hike

NPR’s and other webcasters’ efforts to roll back the crippling royalty rate hike for Internet radio stations have been gutted. A panel of judges at the Copyright Royalty Board denied their appeal, holding up “the original CRB decision in every respect,” though a slight reprieve was granted in allowing stations to pay royalties based on…

NPR Says F$%! the RIAA, Albeit in an Erudite, Strongly Worded Letter After Some Tea

NPR isn’t taking too kindly to the Sound Exchange-drafted royalty rate hike for internet radio stations. The burn? The new rates are “at least 20 times more than what stations have paid in the past” and treats public radio “as if [it] were commercial radio,” though it’s unable to bring in extra revenue to meet…

Yet Another Reason to Boycott the RIAA

The Copyright Royalty Board has decided to accept the “per play” royalty rates proposed for internet radio channels by the RIAA’s digital music extortion fee collection organization, Sound Exchange, despite protests by webcasters. “Per performance” rates are charged per stream per listener. The example the Radio and Internet Newsletter gives is that an “audience of…