I'm posting below an interesting guest contribution by David Julian Gray, Sr. Product Manager, IS Operations at NPR. He originally posted it to an internal NPR blog called Technically Speaking and he's given me permission (thanks) to cross-post here. David is on my staff at NPR, and I should add that this is not an official NPR communication and the usual disclaimer in "About" applies. --Dennis
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Some folks think the end of broadcasting in nigh and "mobile broadband" is the platform of the very-near-term future.
Maybe they're right -- when mobile broadband is sufficiently ubiquitous, sufficiently "broad", sufficiently reliable and sufficiently free -- who wouldn't choose the media rich interactivity of the mobile web over the more limited choices of broadcast ... But those are a lot of "ifs" -- particularly the "free" part, and the ubiquitous part... and the reliable part .... Seems to me it would be a lot simpler just to create a method to associate broadcast streams with mobile web streams. This was part of the promise of "HD Radio" (when it was still called IBOC and our own esteemed Mike Starling had not yet shown everyone the way of multicasting) ...
Where is this promise realized?
Tantalizingly close with the Microsoft Zune-HD with its touch screen WI-FI and HD radio receiver... Tantalizingly close with the internet only NPR Radio by Livio ...Tantalizingly close with the iPod nano ... close ...but no "cigar" which in this case is, not just a "smart" radio -- but a really smart radio which seamlessly integrates broadcast streams with the richness and interactivity of the WEB.
What could be so hard? Receiver chips are cheap and essentially all broadcast streams already carry digitally encoded station identification information as part of either -or both- its RADIO DATA SYSTEM data or its HD Radio stream. All that is needed is for a device -- something similar to (but just that much smarter than) the three mentioned above -- to add a simple program which grabs the already present station ID information and looks up the stations web presence as listed in the Domain Name System, then allow the user to navigate from WEB to Radio -- Radio to WEB ... and they move from stream to stream.
Beyond enriching the user experience beyond what either medium provides alone today (even with dual devices), such a system provides the bridging technology which enables, and perhaps even hides, a transition from traditional broadcasting to mobile web ... a smooth, transparent user experience should such a transition come in 18 months, 18 years, or never ...
Call this system: RADIO-DNS... that's the clear and logical name this existing technology has ...Perhaps we should climb on board ... learn more...
David Julian Gray -- Sr. Product Manager, IS Operations
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