The CES consumer electronics show is underway and Sprint has announced some of their cell phones will be enabled to receive FM radio. For Sprint, this means that instead of using iHeartRadio to hear a digital feed of almost any station in the country and consuming Sprint’s 3G/4G bandwidth, if you are in range of a local FM radio station, you could listen to your local radio station’s fluttering analog signal with its 26 minutes an hour of commercials through your android cell phone.
That’s a reasonable thing to offer if it is what consumers want. What is not reasonable is the NAB (especially Emmis) wanting a government mandate that ALL portable electronic devices (including things like iPods and blackberry devices) must have an FM radio built in and that local broadcasters have the ability using the Emergency broadcast system to interrupt your game of Angry Birds to warn you about an “emergency”
Be careful what you ask for – when people begin to think of their cell phone as a “radio”, they might find that Sprint Android app has ads for Pandora and SiriusXM – not limited to just local stations with strong signals.
The emergency warning would not be a bad thing. I had been evacuated in Kansas because of a tornado warning. A smart system that sees the path of the tornado and then interrupts every game of angry birds in its path would be a good thing.
You and I know the reality of it though – there is no opt out and one man’s spam is another’s important message. I can not opt out of the fios spam on my set top box, or the emergency testing they do on a monthly basis.
Anyone old enough to remember the 1960s remember the frequent tests of “the Emergency Broadcast System”… countless millions of dollars spent on it and countless interruptions of daily life. On 9-11, they were no where to be found, and neither were our tax dollars.