And Now For The Technology News...

The TIVO is a wonderful thing. You watch the shows you want to watch when you want to watch them and you can pause and fast-forward through commercials and all that other good stuff. I've had my TIVO for about 3 years now and it's certainly one of those technologies that once you have it you never want to give it up.

But that's old news and I certainly didn't come here tonight to talk about TIVO. What I do want to talk about, though, is Audiofeast. Sure Audiofeast has been around a while, but even though it's not anything new it's still not nearly as well known as its TIVO brethren. If you don't know what Audiofeast is let me briefly explain. It's an internet service (website, if you will) that allows members to download pre-recorded audio to their PC's and MP3 players. They offer such things as music channels and shows from NPR, PRI and a similar content providers. They have a free client that you download and install on your PC and a free 'basic service' subscription that you can use to sample their content. If you want content beyond the basics then they charge a subscription of around $3.00 to $5.00 dollars per month.

That's Audiofeast in a nutshell, and as I see it there are 2 major problems with the service as it currently exists. The first is that their music channels support only 2 MP3 players. That means that out of the dozens of MP3 players available right now, only 2 will work with their music service. Now, these happen to be fine players but neither one is exactly a market leader, and the vast majority of people who don't own either of these players are just plain out of luck, particularly the millions of IPod owners out there. Clearly there needs to be more player support here.

The second and more serious problem, however, is the lack of content. Sure, they've got most of the music genres covered but their NPR and other offerings are pretty slim. I can get Marketplace (a good thing) but no Car Talk or Terri Gross (a very bad thing), and the offerings beyond NPR and PRI are pretty spotty. I've got to admit I've never really felt it worth my while to pony up the subscription price just to get access to the 'Haunted History' show from the History Channel or 'American Chopper' from the Discovery Channel.

But despite the problems and the dubious prospects for it's long term survival, Audiofeast is very interesting because it offers a real glimpse into what I think is the future of radio - a future so obvious that I can't think why none of the great technological brains out there haven't hashed it out. After all, the promise of Audiofeast is audio content you want when you want it. You don't have to be at your radio at 3:00 in the afternoon to catch your favorite show, you don't have to buy a subscription or specialized equipment to listen to your favorite satellite station, all you have to do is tell Audiofeast (or a company like Audiofeast) what programs you want to record or what kind of music you want to listen to, and the software and the servers and the hi-speed connections do the rest. Now, if you could do that easily and inexpensively then who wouldn't want that?

The problem, of course, is that most people listen to the radio in their cars, and before any kind of audio revolution could happen there would have to be some way to get that content onto the car radio. But then, there already is, isn't there? In fact if you stop to think about it there are multiple ways to get the content onto the car radio. All you need are the kinds of car radios that can read, store and playback digital music.

The most obvious solution and the one that has already been tried is to build radios that can play back both regular audio CD's as well as data CD's full of MP3 files. Unfortuantely this requires a person to download the audio and then burn it to a CD, which is more work than most people want to do on a daily basis.

Another approach is to combine the car radio and the MP3 player into a sort of hybrid device that is like a radio with a hard drive. With such a device all you need to do is remove a cartridge-like hard drive from your car stereo, connect it to your PC via the USB port and then copy the content directly to the hard drive from your PC. When you are through you merely pop the hard drive back into your car stereo and you're set to go. The problem here, however, is that hard drives are not well-suited to the conditions found in most moving vehicles, particularly the shakes and bumps of the road and the extreme heat that can build up inside during the summertime.

A far better and simpler approach and the one no one has thought of as far as I can tell would be to build a memory card reader into the car stereo instead of a hard drive. As you know memory cards are far sturdier than hard drives and would be much better suited to the demands of a car-based system. Furthermore, thanks to the digital photography revolution most people are probably more comfortable working with memory cards than they would be with swapping hard drives in and out. Memory card readers are also small and compact, and the memory cards themselves are widely available in stores and on the internet.

The d0wnside to using memory cards is that they could not hold as much content as a hard drive, but I wonder how much content you really need to carry around with you in your car. I saw a gigabyte Compactflash card advertised for under $100 today, and a card like that should give a person at least 10 hours worth of audio content. More than enough to get most people through the day.

One other approach to getting the content into the car is add networking capabilities (most likely wireless) to the car stereo, making the car just another location on your home network. That would work but I think would still be beyond the capabilites of a lot of people out there. Maybe not, but the memory card seems much easier and is a technology that most people already know how to use.

However it's done, though, I think the combination of something like Audiofeast with the car stero would fundamentally change the entire radio business. Why wouldn't it? Like I said before, why wouldn't you want to be able to choose what you listen to on the radio if it could be cheaply and easily done? In fact if I was Clear Channel or Sirius or XM Radio I might be more than a little concerned. Just because Audiofeast hasn't been able to execute on this idea doesn't mean someone else won't come along and make it work. In fact I'd count it because it just makes so much sense.

But then, my predictions are usually wrong, or at least premature. I gotta tell ya' though, this isn't some future technology, and all that's needed is for someone to come along and put together the pieces.

And it would change everything.