The CEO of Emmis Radio has been pushing this issue for probably 5 years.<\/p>\n
Listening to the FM radio on your cell phone is popular in Asia, and as a result many Android cell phones have the ability to listen to FM stations “Over the air” – this has a few benefits – you don’t burn Cell Data to listen to the station, and your battery will last longer since it isn’t needing to bang the cell tower to get the stream. <\/p>\n
Sprint in particular in the last week is pushing the idea, probably to offload as much of this as is possible – having everyone stream local radio stations via 4G is just not a long term strategy – there was way more people than there is bandwidth. It’s fine when a handful of geeks do it, not so clever when 50,000 people want to do it.<\/p>\n
The company \/ App that seems to have this market is NextRadio<\/p>\n
Supported Devices<\/a><\/p>\n Note that the iPhone is not on their list. It is unclear whether the iPhone has this ability and\/or Apple has any obligation to enable it.<\/p>\n The downside to this app is of course – it only works on the 40 or so local stations you would hear on a pocket transistor radio – not the 9,500 stations available via streaming.<\/p>\n I have no objection at all to the concept of using your phone as an FM radio – what I did object to (and still do) is the Emmis CEO wants government mandates that this ability be built into ALL smart phones. That way he can take over your phone to send you EAS alert test – to protect the children from terrorists, of course.<\/p>\n Anyone have an Android phone that wants to take this for a test drive and report bacK \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The CEO of Emmis Radio has been pushing this issue for probably 5 years. Listening to the FM radio on your cell phone is popular in Asia, and as a result many Android cell phones have the ability to listen … Continue reading