There’s been a decent amount of noise lately about Motorola’s iRadio product, which was first “launched” back in February, that the company is planning to “unveil” again. iRadio looks to bridge the gap between online radio, PCs, mobile phones and home and car stereos. It will let users download pre-recorded commercial-free “stations”, then play them back over another Bluetooth-equipped stereo.
iRadio is attempting to make the mobile phone a music hub for end users, and sounds like it could potentially quite interesting. A lot depends on the content of the channels: will they be simply genre-based, or will users be able to personalize their streams like last.FM or Launchcast? Users will still have to download the content to their computers and sync the device, but a major problem is how many people have Bluetooth car or home stereos, and how long will it take those to become established in the market?
Motorola says the service will cost between $5 and $7 a month, with operators getting the bulk of that. That’s another problem. While it doesn’t sound like much, what happens when you’ve got people paying about $13 a month for satellite radio or $4 a month for Launchcast Plus? Adding on another $5 or $7 for mobile access to different content — as well as plunking down for a new Moto handset that can handle the service and whatever other hardware you’d need — seems like a lot. Satellite radio broadcasters have made no secret their desire to get their hardware inside handsets, and there’s the forthcoming potential of DVB-H and DMB broadcasts. A standalone service requiring a lot of proprietary hardware would appear to pale in comparison.
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