Post date: Jul 26, 2010 12:55:20 AM
Jul 15, 10:36 AM
Posted by: Michael Schmitt
The signs that people want in-car Internet media — Net radio included — are becoming clearer and clearer. A recent study by Autobytel found that 68% of folks 35 and under want in-car web access. Moreover, even though in-car web solutions are coming soon from Ford, BMW, Pioneer and others (as demonstrated in the video at right), consumers aren’t waiting. They’re bringing Internet radio into their cars themselves, either through smartphones or carputers(computers and displays installed in car dashboards). Even iPads have been installed in car dashboards (RAIN coverage here and here).
This DIY activity perhaps signals a greater consumer demand for in-car Net access, meaning — as Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media writes (here) — that “in-car streaming will be a huge deal.” And it will have implications for how consumers think of radio. For instance, the way radio is delivered (AM, FM, satellite, Internet) will become less important than the content of each radio channel.
To Ando Media’s Jordan Mendell (here), that means “companies like XM Sirius, will stop spending millions of dollars keeping their satellites in orbit and instead focus on creating great content and using the Internet to distribute it.”
In this new world, radio stations will be “judged, evaluated, and accepted or rejected” just like on cable TV, Jacobs writes. He recommends then that broadcasters take a long hard look at their stations, because they’ll soon be judged right alongside Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm and the thousands of niche web radio streams.