An American Lion

Livio Radio for Pandora

Last year, when I was dictating to my staff the details of my burgeoning Internet empire, I told them that I might want to have a food blog, but I definitely wanted a gadget blog. My food blog lasted about a week. Some dingbat complained that I stole her recipe, but, under basic fair use rules, I was solid. I deleted the food blog. I truck no complaints from dingbats.

I started gadjimatronics because I like to invent words. I came up with “widebody slapfaces” and “barfunked” and “skadiggety” and “bum scuffles” and a bunch of other brilliant words, but I think “gadjimatronics” is probably the best one of all. You’re welcome.

When you have 20 or more blogs, and only spend about twenty minutes a day working on them, things tend to get a little loose. Don’t expect too many posts over there for a while. I have naps to take, and pictures of hotties to give the thumb up or the thumb down to. Byron selects ALL of the hottie pictures, and I sit on the couch, watching Sportscenter. He patiently tabs through them, and I give him an up or down, and then he crops them and organizes them. The boy is masterful when it comes to Internet pornography, I have to admit.

Miranda drops in once in a while and changes the text below the title and then tells me what to write about. Some of this comes from her mother, my ex-wife, so I have to be careful.

Anyway, the point of this post was to yap about something called Pandora Radio:

Pandora Inc. has struck a deal with electronics maker Pioneer Corp. that promises to make it easier for drivers to listen to its personalized radio service in cars—bringing Internet radio one step closer to snagging a built-in spot on dashboards. The development represents a direct challenge to broadcasters of satellite and traditional radio, who have long dreaded the arrival of Internet radio in cars.

Starting in March, Pioneer will sell a navigation and entertainment device that allows Pandora users who stream the service on their AppleInc. iPhones to easily access Pandora in their cars. The $1,200 navigation system, announced today at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, will detect iPhones and iPod touches that have Pandora installed, and put the consumer’s Pandora settings on the navigation screen. That will allow drivers to hear their favorite Pandora radio channels.

Neither side paid cash to work with the other, said Ted Cardenas, director of marketing for Pioneer, who says he saw it as an opportunity to reach many of Pandora’s 42 million users. “This gives us the ability to talk to an entirely new group of consumers,” he said in an interview.

At Pandora, executives hope the deal will help expand the way its fans think of the service. “Maybe a year ago people would have said Pandora is a computer thing,” said co-founder Tim Westergren. Now, “they’re beginning to realize that Internet radio is an anytime, anywhere thing.”

Radio companies, long used to a relative monopoly on dashboards, have been nervously anticipating the era when they will lose their dominance in cars. They have been working hard on their own online radio services, which include streamed versions of their regular stations as well as Internet-only stations.

Sounds like a wonderful innovation, but, correct me if I’m wrong—isn’t there supposed to be some way to interrupt regular radio programming for emergencies? How do you get breaking news of traffic and public safety information in a reliable way? Do you have to have subscriptions to local stations that would give you that? Do you have a way to shut down or interrupt streaming music? It would be rare that this would be an issue, but, in some areas of the country, the weather makes local radio indispensable. Some of these devices have been around since September, I see. Looks somewhat big and bulky, but I suspect that the device will shrink and change with innovation.

Third Generation (3G) networks are already overwhelmed, especially in New York City. If you mean to say that, by adding tens of thousands of users of Pandora to an existing network infrastructure, you’ll be compensating for that by building up that infrastructure, all well and good. Where’s the plan? Where’s the money? And when will someone admit that the fees for Pandora would have to go up as network costs rise? What if the Internet slows or goes out altogether? Broadcast radio can be sent out from remote locations, powered by fueled generators, to devices run on batteries. Can the Internet radio do that? Or will the 3G networks collapse if the power is out for too long? I can tell you one thing—if the data networks don’t start increasing their capacity, consumers are going to revolt and abandon these services BEFORE they can start making a lot of money.

What are the lobbyists doing to level this playing field? Major broadcasters ARE NOT going to stand by and do nothing. Laws and regulations are coming.

It sounds wonderful, but usually, things that go bust sound like the cat’s pajamas. Satellite radio certainly sounded like that.