Just as families of yore gathered by the hearth to listen to Father Coughlin or FDR's fireside chats, two Net-audio technology companies are hoping that a new captive audience, commuters, will tune in to hear what they're offering.
With more than 84 million Americans driving daily to work, Audio Highway and Audible Inc. have designed mobile playback devices to download audio programming from the Web and broadcast to dead stations on an FM car stereo. But if these gadgets open up the promise of spin-your-own radio, don't expect access to treacly Taylor Dane singles just yet - the companies are betting their success on high-brow fare more tailored to NPR listeners than soft-jazz fans.
At core, the devices hope to transform driving downtime into thoughtful "productivity," says Audible Inc. president Donald Katz. "You can get up out of bed and program [your radio] for your drive time. You can take time that you can't look at a screen or read and it will be a far more ... vivid intellectual experience."
Using Audio Highway's Listen Up player and docking station, customers cut and paste from a broad spectrum of shows, including talk-radio program Newsweek On Air, essays from the MIT Press, "Magical Thinking" musings by Deepak Chopra, and news reports from CNET, AP, and Brite Financial News. The Listen Up player, which can record up to one hour on 12 MB of memory, is available to order only at the Web site, but soon the unit (and docking device) will be sold in traditional outlets like CompUSA.
Though the downloads are free, the Listen Up device will retail at US$299. The company, however, won't make money on the device, says CEO Nathan Schulof. Instead, Audio Highway, which launches on Friday, has slotted six minutes of commercials for every one hour of audio. "At prime time, TV has 19 minutes of commercials per hour, and radio will go from 11 to 13 minutes on average." Schulof says. "Six minutes is not intrusive."
Currently, download times for a five-minute show can take more than a minute, but Schulof assures that the time will get reduced to 20 seconds by Christmas. Like the Pilot, the player can be programmed to download content at specific times. Inside the car, users tune the device to one of four channels "that generally aren't used," says Schulof, and the FM transmitter broadcasts onto the car stereo (the player must be within 15 feet of the radio).
But the device itself may need some fine-tuning. "It will have to get user-friendly," says Robert Gould, head of talk-radio network GRIT. "It's small and very techie - like a little cellular phone." News broadcasts over Listen Up could also prove outdated compared to the more traditional methods. "[Traditional] radio happens to be very good for the news," says Katz. "If I want to listen to up-to-the-minute news, it won't be something I downloaded."
Audible, which launches its service in September, may be a little behind, but the company is chasing down other game - the $1.5 billion audio-book industry. With 52 different content partners, Audible customers will be able to listen literature by authors like Armistead Maupin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Edith Wharton. In addition, the company is working to port materials previously unavailable in audio form, like the Harvard Business Review, Jupiter conferences, or the broadcasts from the lecture series at New York's 92nd Street YMCA. Users will pay for the broadcasts on a show-by-show basis, at about 60 percent of the retail price, says Katz.
"This is a huge idea," says Josh Harris, head of online radio network Pseudo. "You can carry around with you info and entertainment that meets your gratification schedule very precisely." Harris, who carries around an AM radio with him at all times, says the mobile playback device is the sibling of the Pilot, with a commercial spin. "It's the next generation Walkman," he says.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
