What You Need To Know About WiFi Radio
When Freddie Mercury of the super group Queen sang, "You've yet to have your finest hour, Radio," in Radio Ga-Ga, he was mourning the sweeping changes in music and technology. He never got to hear WiFi radio, which became accessible years after the great singer passed away. Despite all the visual stimulations and new entertainment devices created to capture out attention, we still need to listen to music. Perhaps WiFi radio will deliver radio's "finest hour".
It's Life, Captain, But Not As We Know It
WiFi radio works much the same as your regular radio or your television. Information gets transported through the air on special waves (this time, electromagnetic radio waves) and can be picked up by gizmos that can pick up these waves and translate it to sound. In other words, WiFi radio is an interpreter of any WiFi radio station it can pick up.
And how many radio stations on the wireless internet are there? Thousands! One WiFi radio, called the Terratic Noxon iRadio, can pick up over 10,000 stations. That's a lot of choice for the music lover. You can pick up the WiFi international feeds offered by different countries. And there's almost no commercials and very clear reception. They're portable and can be powered by batteries or an electrical outlet. In other words, they look and act much like usual transistor radios, but are much, much better.
Most of these WiFi radios include little extras like outlets to plug in your iPod or MP3 player, water resistance and the ability to play podcasts (which only go out through the internet). Channels are listed by genre, by geographical location or alphabetically in case you want a challenge.
What's The Catch?
The catch with WiFi radio is that record companies and traditional radio stations HATE it and doing all they can to stamp it out of existence. But the internet is the world's largest library. If you spend time and money shutting down one WiFi radio station, a 100 will pop up overnight to take its place.
The other catch is this is the newest generation of radio technology in existence, which means there are still a lot of bugs to work out. For instance, some radios only come with mono speakers, which can distort the very sounds you are trying to hear. Whoops! Also, you do need legal connection to a wireless internet service, which is a monthly fee usually. The WiFi radios themselves cost a couple of hundred dollars (US).
