Internet kills the radio star

13 March 2008 - 16:32

I'm typing this while listening to a Bach flute concerto, courtesy of Otto's Baroque internet radio station and a Revo Pico WiFi receiver. I've suddenly become a fan of Internet radio. With over 10,000 stations to listen to from all around the world including more than 300 classical music stations, all at digital quality, the airwaves have nothing to match it. And this Revo receiver will play MP3s direct from a PC (or in my case a network attached storage device) as well.

I'm surprised at my conversion. Many years ago, in my early teens, I was a short wave listener. I tuned the airwaves with a portable receiver, listening to the latest from Radio Moscow, Radio Canada or Voice of America, or straining to hear exotic, low powered stations from Africa, South America or the Caribbean. You had to work for your entertainment. Internet radio brings these stations loud and clear, just as if they were next door.

I must confess that as an Internet user and radio enthusiast I have always argued against the use of the Internet for broadcasting, on technical grounds. It is a very expensive way to broadcast compared to radio. A conventional radio transmission costs the same whether there is one or one million listeners. With Internet radio, every listener consumes resources. The more listeners a station has, the more powerful the servers it needs and the greater the capacity of its connection to the Internet. When the BBC started offering online radio a few years ago, the streams were often of quite low quality because its servers couldn't cope with the demand.

At the receiving end there is a danger that the phone lines that carry our broadband ADSL connections could be overwhelmed by the volume of audio and video data being carried over them - audio and video that could easily be received by radio waves instead. This is a real concern now in the UK, due to the increasing popularity of the BBC iPlayer, which allows people to watch BBC TV programmes from the last 7 days, on demand. People using the net to get information may find their connections reduced to a crawl by others watching the latest movie. This is not what TCP/IP was designed for.

But it's fun tuning in to what people half a world away are listening to. The Revo Pico WiFi is well made, looks great and sounds great. You don't have to look at an advert-laden radio station website while hearing the music through tinny laptop speakers. You could probably feed the audio from this into your home stereo hi-fi. The Pico runs off house power, but has an internal rechargeable battery that lets it run for up to 8 hours autonomously, so you can carry it around like any portable radio, as long as you remain within range of your wireless network.

I was impressed how easily it was to set up the media player, too. Networks are usually notworks where I am concerned. But the Pico WiFi found the workgroup and listed all the computers. I selected the network attached storage device by name and was then able to browse all the shared folders. When I picked the Music folder, the Pico was not defeated by the fact that it is password protected, and allowed me to enter in the user name and password. Then it browsed the contents and built a library list which I can select by album name or artist.

Now if only I could find the time to rip 200 CDs to MP3 I could get rid of my CD storage shelves and be able to browse my entire music collection from my armchair using the Pico's remote control. But there's no rush, I've still got another 9999 radio stations to listen to!