A few years ago when we bought our iPod we also bought a car adapter / FM transmitter unit so we could play tunes from the little Pod in the car. Whenever we went anywhere on road trips we had almost our whole music collection with us. Rock on.
The FM transmitter was the coolest part because of the setup because we could broadcast (within a limited range) on any FM frequency we wanted. We had become micro-pirate radio DJs. Sure we only did it in our apartment and our car, and sure is was hard for cars traveling beside us to pick up the signal for very long (We tried all kinds of different stations and distances and maxed out about 40 feet on a really low band - 88.1 or something. Hey, what else are you going to do between Medicine Hat and Regina?), but if someone with some electrical engineering know-how got ahold of that technology, they could have done some very cool things with it.
Now I've come across Roadcasting, which seems to amount to the system we had conceived on our road trips, but on a way grander scale, with auto-detect software that, like, totally turbocharges the experience of discovery. Everybody becomes their own micro DJ, broadcasting their playlist into the wireless cloud around them and receiving songs from others at the same time. If only I could listen to multiple songs at once!
The concept looks to be established but not yet picked up by anyone with any clout. They've received some glowy coverage from leading nerdlinger publishers but no commercial offers. And I don't know if they will - the whole concept seems pretty threatening to established media players and too geeky for the scale demanded by car manufacturers. But maybe it'll emerge organically as another component of the everyone's-a-producer-and-everyone's-a-consumer-all-the-time paradigm.
Also, apparently, Canadians are the number one file sharers in the world. Who knew? Good on us.
Posted by James Sherrett at February 3, 2006 04:33 PM