Do consumers want radios built into their mobile devices so they can save on precious bandwidth? In other words, does the use of audio streaming itself push bandwidth past available data caps? Is audio a “data hog”? Is there a consumer problem here? I have previously argued that audio streams are, in fact, fairly economical. Even if you do all of your streaming audio consumption without the benefit of Wi-Fi, you’d need to stream about 4 hours on Pandora every day to hit a 2-g

With a great flourish, the powers-that-be behind the NextRadio app have announced that this week shall begin a thunderous effort to enlist one constituency so far utterly lacking in enthusiasm for NextRadio’s product: Consumers. And so begins an onslaught of over-the-air radio spots designed to lead consumers to download an app that will not work on most of their phones, meanwhile attempting to incite rage that the “choppy, buffered streaming radio” that wireless companies “w

Lots of folks in the radio space are talking about Emmis’ NextRadio initiative to activate FM chips in smartphones (here and here), but not a lot of folks in the industry are paying attention to NextRadio’s primary partner, Sprint. Remember that one of the driving arguments for NextRadio is that consumers can conserve bandwidth by tuning in radio over-the-air without eating up precious bits and bytes. But nobody in radio seemed to notice Sprint’s announcement last month that

I am stridently pro-consumer. I believe that if we focus on what consumers show us they want, then we will have more consumers, happier consumers, and a healthier business overall. This is the thinking that has driven all my successful audience research efforts for years. So it was with much disappointment that I reviewed the recent research project produced by Coleman Research for NextRadio, financed by the NAB. Coleman has a well-deserved strong reputation, but this deeply

From Radio Ink: The latest statistics from Emmis regarding NextRadio show the popularity in the app is still on the rise. NextRadio allows listeners to access their favorite radio station on select Sprint phones without using data. In addition to the NextRadio app being downloaded over 240,000 times, listeners have tuned to nearly nearly 8,000 radio stations racking up over 190,000 hours of listening through the app since it was launched. In January and February of 2014, the

Last week one of the radio industry’s big headlines was the preliminary deal struck between Sprint and various players in radio to provide over-the-air FM on Sprint devices via the Emmis/HD Radio NextRadio platform.  I haven’t seen much thoughtful analysis on this yet, so here goes nothing. On the surface, this is good news.  After all, it means more ways for listeners to listen to the stations they love and more ways to interact with those stations. Looking deeper, however,

Since when did I become the guy who didn’t want FM in mobile phones?  Bring it on, device-makers!  Install those chips! Actually, I don’t care whether or not FM is in mobile phones because I don’t think it makes one bit of difference to radio’s future whether it’s there or not (radio “experiences” need to be part of the mobile device ecosystem, to be sure.  But FM chips?  Feh). Jeff Smulyan thinks otherwise (see his reply to my post here).  I have the greatest respect for Jef