Radio

It's obvious that the radio we all knew from childhood of AM and FM is on the way out. If you're looking around at all, you know that. Between Satellite Radio, and Internet Radio, broadcast radio is being crushed out of the market.

Between internet and satellite, there's a lot of market share between them. Currently many people are buying cars with built-in satellite radio systems, which can be easily ignored by anyone competent and wishing to use some type of cell-phone based internet radio. With some service providers offering unlimited data on some cell phone plans, it's becoming more viable to have internet radio in the car.

However, a lot of people have, or will get a car with satellite radio integrated. The integration of the satellite radio plus the complexities of actually getting internet radio into your car, people will probably just pay for the service and forget about it. Which brings me to my next point... The primary company for Satellite Radio is just one company, Sirius Satellite, or XM, which are both the same company now.

Sirius/XM not only offers satellite, which you can listen to on the receiver built into your car, but internet radio you can listen to on any computer, as well as, iPhone, Blackberry and Android applications. The iPhone/BB/Droid markets are really the most significant place for any company to go for distributing a new application which would compete with Sirius/XM. A prime example of this competition are services like Pandora Internet Radio, and Grooveshark. I'm not sure what Pandora is peddling for their mobile application, since it's been a while since Pandora has been available where I live, but with Grooveshark, there's a subscription fee, for Grooveshark VIP status, that allows the use of the mobile app.

I dunno about you, but if I have to choose between listening to Internet Radio all the time (in the car, on the computer, on the go, etc), and Listening to satellite when I'm in the car (or on the go, depending on the receiver), and internet radio everywhere else, for fairly comparable prices.... I'm in favor of Satellite.

I know with my Satellite receiver, I can buy a home kit, that will hook up to my stereo at home; it also has a battery so I can hook up some headphones and listen on the bus, street corner, wherever. When I'm stationary at home, or away from my unit, I can always load up the Android app and listen wherever I happen to be (provided I get a 3g or wifi signal)... and if I happen to be somewhere strange, like a friends house, and want to listen to some tunes on my Sirius/XM subscription, I can login on the website and listen to all my favorite channels over the internet.

While some setups, like Pandora, have the ability to almost generate your own radio stations based on what YOU like, many people don't care to have that level of customization, or they just don't have the time to be able to tweak the settings so the radio stations are just-so. So even with that, they're still using an internet radio service on their 3g data plan... so then there's that.

Overall, I believe there will always be a place for Internet-only dedicated radio... I just don't think it's in the car. Thats why it'll be difficult to get rid of broadcast radio, and even more difficult to overtake satellite.