Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future

Radio stations are willing to fork over $100 million a year to music labels, but in return they want Congress to make FM receivers mandatory in portable devices. The labels think having an FM radio in every Droid and iPhone is a great idea, and both sides hope to go to Congress soon.

<a href='http://meincmagazine.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/radio-riaa-mandatory-fm-radio-in-cell-phones-is-the-future.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[NaraVara]

But the music and radio industries say it's a consumer-focused proposition, one that would provide "more music choices."

lolwut?

Yes. It's a consumer focused decision to force me to pay for a feature I have no intention of using that will also negatively affect my battery-life all for the sake of keeping a dying and obsolete technology on life-support for no discernible reason.

 

[NaraVara]

My Incredible has an FM tuner, but only if I have a headset attached, I assume because the wire of the headset acts as the antenna. Its an extra feature of the phone, one which I don't use often but which does indeed give me more choices, if I don't want to listen to Last.fm or Pandora. So I see their point there.

However, do we really need a law mandating that we have that choice no matter what phone we have? Doesn't that unfairly burden electronics makers, both by adding a piece of hardware that they may not want to add and by stopping them from using the inclusion of an FM tuner as a way of differentiating their product?

The proposal seems to say "We'd like to make even more money than we're currently making, but businesses only peripherally related to ours aren't making that ridiculously easy. We feel that manufacturers of portable electronics should be required by law to support our business model. Oh, and it would kinda help consumers, too! Assuming that it doesn't raise the price of the electronics, but we have no control over the obvious downstream effects of our proposal."

Also, is there a source for this? All the links in the article just go to other, related Ars articles.

I remember way back when the iPod first came out everyone was like “ZOMG No FM Tuner? FAIL! Kids needs their FM!” And then it turned out that hey, kids don’t need their FM because aside from FM hungrily sucking down extra battery power from my phone, the content on FM fucking sucks unless you like NPR and that’s available on a podcast now. We already tried FM tuners. The market decided it was a stupid idea. Generally when the market decides something is a stupid idea, it’s best not to force people to do it anyway unless there is an unpriced externality involved. What’s the externality here? ClearChannel isn’t making enough money? Sorry, can’t bring myself to care.

 

[NaraVara]

I don’t really understand this idea that FM is the most effective way to communicate info. in a disaster either. Sure it’s the currently accepted way, but I feel like the most effective way to get my attention would be for my cell-phone carrier to send me a text message or PUSH notification.: “ICBM en route to your location. GTFO.”

 

[NaraVara]

Well, after seeing the update with information from NAB, the rationale is (as we probably should have expected) "lifeline information" getting to as many people as possible. However, I don't see this making much sense. We don't require all people to carry an emergency radio with them at all times, because that would be ludicrous.

And clearly, the devices they're talking about are the Internet-connected devices that are streaming from the web rather than using radio. Unless I'm very mistaken, if the FM tuner will work (i.e. your device has power and an antenna), the Internet connectivity will also probably work. I'll grant that you have to deal with network coverage, which isn't as extensive as radio coverage, but then people living outside that coverage wouldn't have purchased the device anyway. So a preferable solution to my mind, and one that I hope someone proposes, would be a lifeline information service that streams over the Internet. Heck, make creating that federally mandated; I'd support that! I'd even be able to get behind a tiny app that can receive push notifications from this hypothetical service and warn me of danger being required by law on mobile devices. That would be less expensive, smaller, and wouldn't generate profits for the music and radio industries, while at the same time saving lives.

Someone should write that up. IANAL; anyone game?

Well during disasters the cell phone network tends to choke. In DC even during Obama’s inauguration there were so many people flooding the city that pretty much all cell coverage died. You couldn’t even send a text-message, so accessing anything on 3G is out of the question. Analog radio has the advantage of being passive so people can just pick it up and get vital information on demand.

Of course, like I said before. If you want to utilize a cell-network for lifeline info, it would make a lot more sense to just have the cell carriers shut down the network for phone-calls in an emergency and just send everyone PUSH notifications or text messages with the relevant details. If all phones have a GPS locator you can even custom tailor the message to tell them only the nearest aid station or whatever so they don’t have to sit there listening for every single location within the AM/FM tuner’s coverage zone to figure out which one they need to get to. This could all be implemented without much difficulty on the programming end, although the hardware might cost a fair amount on the carrier’s side and on the phone's own software development side since they'd probably need some system by which the carrier can have the phone determine which info to display based on your location.

But overall this would actually be a much more useful way to do disaster preparedness than the clumsy radio method.

 

[NaraVara]

Not really absurd and a more justifiable proposition that the FM radio. Also I think people forget that the chips for some of these features are mature and very small.

The chip may be small, but having it on will hog battery power and raise the cost of the device. Also, having yet another antenna on the device will bring more risk of signal attenuation.