The National Association of Broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America, which have often bickered over royalties rules, have agreed that your iPhone and iPod need to have built-in FM radio capabilities via special microchips and want to push laws to make it happen.
The Consumer Electronics Association isn’t happy with the plan. A representative told Apple Insider: “Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace,” NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.”
If you’ve got an iThing, do you wish it had FM radio?
NAB, RIAA seek to push FM radio into iPods and iPhones [AppleInsider]
(Thanks, fantomesq!)
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I thought ipods already had FM Tuners..
The latest iPod nanos do, but none of the others, afaik.
yes. current nanos have built in FM.
if there was an option on it that i could remove and not miss – it would be FM radio.
my nano has fm radio, never use except for maybe NRP – once in a while. seems to suck more battery than tunes and who wants to listen commercial radio anyway – same rotation of tunes and advertisements……….
Tunes? Is that like ‘Pop’ or ‘Clicker-Clacker’?
Really? Tunes is a universal slang for songs/music. It’s not at all regional and hugely popular. I kind of wonder how sheltered you must be if you’ve never heard this expression.
yeah, where do they think the name iTunes came from!?
everyone’s love of Tiny Toons, was my guess.
There was an extender that plugged into the 10-pin port on the old iPods that gave it a FM receiver/antennae. It worked just fine for many of the local channels and stronger signals.
I had that and I loved it. I used it for the radio once in a while, but it was mainly great for the controls on the remote. Eventually, after a few years of use, the headphone jack on my iPod started dying and that saved me since it plugged into the dock connector. It eventually met a sad end in a car door.
Zunes had them first. I guess Apple has followed suit with the IPod Nanos.
Only current generation Nanos have FM radios (and I bet you less than 1% of people that own them actually know that there IS an FM radio in them, and maybe 10% of them actually use it.) But I do remember the first iPod I owned (5th gen 30Gb) had a $60 option to give you an FM radio — the iPod radio remote. I actually bought one of those – the thing hardly worked in receiving much of anything, and let’s face it, by then I was (and still am) listening to downloaded podcasts on my way to/from work.
The way that the FM radio is set up in the iPod nano is as a portal for you to identify new music to later buy from iTunes.
As long as we’re making laws to protect dying/dead technology, why don’t the floppy disc manufacturers unite and try to get a law requiring that all laptops have floppy drives? Or VHS companies could push to make a law mandating that all DVD or Blu-Ray players also include the ability to play VHS tapes. Or have the casette tape industry demand that all car stereos have the ability play casette tapes? Really, I could go on all day. This is just ridiculous.
I would like my Wii to be equipped with a Beta player.
Dude, Sony would get really pissed about that.
Why stop there? Stick a wax cylinder on that thing. The Nintendo Wiilinder.
The Nintendo Wiilinder.
That cracks me up.
I’ll go one better – I want my Wii to have an 8-track tape player built into it! I miss my old Max Webster on 8-track.
i think cars should come with record players
I must be too much of an engineer. My first thought was how you could get it not to skip every time you go over a bump.
Duh. Springs.
Oh no! You need to use a gyroscope and active magnetic repulsion to keep the record player steady. This has the added benefit of giving me more work.
Been done. I’ve seen other versions meant to even further reduce skipping–could probably find them with a patent search–but this might have been the most successful example:
http://www.roadkillontheweb.com/arp.html
Look, I may be misinterpreting your words here, but if you’re talking about some sort of hover-record player? I’m in.
Springs! I hope I never see another spring as long as I live!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngBNklagsHQ
If we force them to include floppy drives on laptops, there’d have to be two … 3½ inch and 5¼ drives. And maybe even 8 inch drives. Yep, they existed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Floppy_Disk_Drive_8_inch.jpg). They should also have to 8-track tape players on car stereos.
Hey, let’s go all-in on this “artificial technological boosterism” crusade! Why hold back?
ZIP drive FTW! I love it when my PC noms on my data!
No. I consume mostly NPR, and all that I can have via Podcast as well.
Keep yer darned FM broadcasts out of my devices, household, and cars, thank you very much!
And get off my lawn!
They want to make it a law that iDevices have FM tuners?? Why would that be necessary?? I’m sure they have to say they’re necessary in some way in order to make it a law, right?
Sure, why not? I always like to be reminded of why I don’t listen to terrestrial radio. This would just make that convenient.
I find it hilarious that your avatar is of a character whose day job was to run a call in radio show. heh.
Umm.. uh… Fraszh was from a different, more golden/nostalgic era of terrestrial radio… yeah…
I don’t care all that much whether my iPhone has an FM tuner, but I really don’t think there should be a law about it.
i have iheartradio app… the hell i need a tuner in my phone for? It would be nice, but why force a redesign which will ultimately get passed down to the consumer in the form of a “courtesy fee”
its bad enough the iphone 4 had reception issues from a simple touch…
But you don’t understand. This is about graft and keeping a dying industry alive. It has nothing to do with making any sense.
There called Apps, and I have several local radio station apps on my i-thingy. Maybe the RIAA can sue us because we listen to broadcast radio via a phone without paying a larger royalty. Or perhaps they sue us for unauthorized use of broadcast media.
Rarely. I wouldn’t mind being able to catch NPR on my iPod touch without going over wifi, but this is not the way to see it done. I figure that one reason it hasn’t happened yet is that the batteries in a lot of the targeted devices won’t support that great of playback times.
Most non iDevices already have (and have had) FM tuners since forever.
An FM radio? Not even an HD radio? That’s BS. No thanks.
Replace mine with a second video camera for 3D video awesomeness!
Forcing FM radio just reeks of rent seeking by the broadcast industry and they aren’t even trying to hide it.
I’m surprised they didn’t push this under the guise of public safety, selling it as being so that people always have access to the emergency broadcast system. Even then FM wouldn’t be the best method. I would love for my cell phone to be able to pick up NOAA weather radio S.A.M.E. text alerts to tell me that severe weather is coming.
From the linked post:
“the NAB said in the report that it “would argue that having radio capability on cell phones and other mobile devices would be a great thing, particularly from a public safety perspective. There are few if any technologies that match the reliability of broadcast radio in terms of getting lifeline information to the masses.”
They’re only doing this in the interest of our safety! Hooray!
Yeah, but does this mean they should force people who don’t have a radio to get one? The reasoning would be the same.
You can actually sign up for NOAA email alerts about severe weather and stuff, if you’ve got a smartphone or other device that can receive email.
The only problem is that I was getting emailed CONSTANTLY, even when there really wasn’t anything of note going on. It got so bad that I unsubscribed, since I have a weather radio at home and can check the NOAA web site from my phone, but it was a new system then and they may have improved it.
I listen to FM Radio constantly on my iPod touch, but it’s from a station in Chicago and I live in DC. It has an MP3 audio stream that even prior to the iOS upgrade could play intjebackground while I used other apps onthe iTouch.
How about instead, every FM radio station be required to provide just that sort of stream online that doesn’t require any kind of third party app and uses royalty free compression?
Remember when the RIAA wanted to charge you everytime your ringtone played a song?? lmfao
So, essentially, for years, RIAA, you told us that listening to music for free was bad, and now you want us to listen to music for free?
Go away.
Oh, no, it’s not free at all, at least not for us. Instead of investing in a solution to become relevant (and maybe not terrible), they’d rather make others pay to keep themselves kind of relevant (which those costs would most likely be passed onto the end consumer).
And just wait until they want to start employing premium or tiered pricing.
The RIAA is against adapting to today’s standards?
Shocking.
The industry as a whole has apparently realized that they are better at lobbying and litigating than actually creating a product people want to pay for.
Music sales are down? Well there is no way it is because the current crop of “artists” being pushed by the labels and Clear Channel just don’t inspire people to go out and buy some music. It must be because of piracy. Call the lawyers, they are our new business plan.
Radio listenership is down? No way it is because they fired or pushed out every decent talk show host (Stern, O&A, Corolla, Leykis, Big O and Dukes and Mike O’Meara here in DC), every station sounds the same, plays the same songs (by the same “artists” mentioned above with poor album sales), and has a lame cookie cutter morning show. It must be because there aren’t enough portable devices out there with FM tuners. Call the lobbyists, they are our new business plan.
Damn, another mandated upgrade. Last week I was forced to have iBuggyWhip installed.
Not that I care about iCrap, but FM, AM, etc.. radio stations are doomed, what happened to analog TV will happen to them as well, we’re all moving towards digital. Why don’t we lobby for a mandatory vapor engine since we’re at it.
News talk and sports talk radio?
As good an excuse as any to abolish terrestrial radio outright.
I don’t listen to music on the radio because they don’t play anything I want to hear. That’s the whole point of having an iPod. Adding an FM tuner would be a pointless expense. (Yes, I listen to NPR in the car, but that’s when I’m, you know, in the car. I don’t listen to the radio anywhere else, and not because I don’t have the capability. I just don’t want to.)
If broadcasters want to return to relevance, they need to ditch the ClearChannel model of ubiquitous awful programming and return to the days of DJs who cared about music playing music they cared about. The robo-playlist trend has made sure that radio is homogeneous, bland, and unadventurous, so people who actually want to listen to music have turned to other sources for new music.
Radio broadcasters did this to themselves, and they have only themselves to blame.
Hear, hear!
Co-sign.
I don’t listen to the radio (often) because I don’t want to listen to the same 10 songs forty times. I don’t care about shout outs and lame attempts humor by the DJ’s. Just play the damn song!
Speaking of lameness, and rant, for that matter, a local commercial station has ~2p-6p show on weekdays where a male host says something along the lines of “Good morning sunshine. Yes I know now is afternoon, but I just like to say that.”
Every time I hear it (which is rare), I change the frequency. Listening to same (non-pop) songs is much less annoying.
Exactly! I’ll add that the entire payola / big labels / RIAA cabal did this to themselves. Please, oh please God, let them die!
I listen to Pandora anywhere my Droid has signal, otherwise I stick to mp3s. I don’t see the point in listening to the radio when I can customize Pandora to play the kind of music I like and tell it to NOT play songs I hate/am sick of. You can’t do that with the radio.
I don’t listen to music on the radio because all of the radio stations seem to think they need to turn their multiband digital dynamic range compressors up to ∞:1 with an attack of 1μs and thus destroy any semblance of dynamics that existed in the music, all to get the RMS up as high as they can. I can listen for about five seconds before my head wants to implode. It makes every muscle in my body tense.
Yes, I’m a sound engineer, and an audiophile.
I have many items that can get FM radio with varying levels of quality and portability. I never use them, ever (clock radio is just a clock, audio tuner just used for DVD sound, etc). Why do they want my iPod to have one?
Even more important: In what moronic universe is it cool to create a law forcing technology no one wants into consumer products? Companies gotta spend more to make them, we gotta spend more to buy them, and still no one will listen to the radio unless the radio becomes less retarded.
I have a commercial free policy for all my media devices. FM radio has commercials.
My last couple of phones have had FM radio tuner built in. The problem is that there’s no antenna, so it only works when headphones are attached (the headphones act as the antenna). Also, the receiption at my job (where I listen to headphones) sucks, and I only get 2 or 3 stations anyway. So it is basically useless.
What I’d really like is an AM tuner, or short-wave, but a 3-foot ferrite antenna sticking out of my phone might look funny…
Would love to have AM radio on my deivces. Most of them already have FM, but, sorry, I like some AM radio news and shows. I also read a majority of my news on newspapers. Call me old fashioned.
Here here. I exclusively listen to AM radio in my car. I would love to have it on my iPod so I could plug it into the sound system at work in the morning (I work in an outdoor pub).
But to get one of those tightly-wrapped (and rather large) antennae that would receive an AM radio signal would make your i(anything) rather large. I’m guessing you know Dear Leader Jobs doesn’t like big things. You’ll see an AM radio in anything from Apple the day the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup. In other words, don’t hold your breath.
Chalk me up as an AM fan too. They’d have a better argument if they were lobbying for Weather and live AM news as a safety feature in the iDevices.
I usually side with most of the NAB’s positions, but this a bit much….of course the news is coming from “Apple Insider” who, by name alone, probably won’t offer an unbiased account.
I wonder if I can find a more objective report? Oh, here we go:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/radio-riaa-mandatory-fm-radio-in-cell-phones-is-the-future.ars
Seems your ‘non-biased source’ parroted the same position and many of the same facts. I’m a huge fan of Ars Technica but did their coverage actually lead you to a different conclusion?
I actually didnt read it, HA!, just posted the first link I got from my google search
I imagine ArsTechnica came to their own conclusions their own way, if it happens to include the same facts and come to the same conclusions so be it. I figured if you want a straight story, dont go with the publication whose name contains the name of one of the companies involved. Would you get your unbiased health news from GlaxoSmithKlineWeekly?
As for “parroting”, have you ever tried to re-write a press release? There are only so many ways to say the same thing, especially under a deadline.
Um… you kinda seem… unsmart. You claim there is an obvious bias while not reading the other source which happens to show that this particular piece was not biased. If you’d read the article you yourself posted, you may have reworded your comment in a less biased way, since your (incorrect) assumptions showed your opinion meant more to you than the facts. Just sayin’, future reference, RTFA when you’re the one linking to it.
Not once have I been out and about in with my iThing and wished I could access commercial ridden, moronic DJ infected FM radio on it.
The fact that they have to try to make it a law and force it upon us tells you exactly how much people want it.
My “iThing” or more appropriately “Z-thing” already has an FM radio built in.
The only radio station I listen to is a 50 kw clear channel station (those are all AM). And I get much, much better sound with their iPhone app than I do from their broadcast. So, uh, I wouldn’t even want a mandated AM tuner.
If I wanted an FM tuner I would buy a fucking radio.
Do fucking radios play porn 24/7?
You win.
Nope, fucking radios are the ideal solution to ther problem. You get 1 FM radio and 1 AM radio and a couple months later you have a bunch of little iRadios all over the fucking place. Need for legislation has been averted safely…
The only benefit that I can see is that an FM tunes wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) involve any data bandwidth. It could be a cheap way of listening to local news or sports.
I don’t know where you live, but my local news and sports come in via AM radio. FM radio in NYC consists of 5 stations of jabbering idiots, five stations of the same 10 pop songs played over and over interspersed with jabbering idiots, and thirteen Spanish music stations playing what seems to be the exact same song 24 hours a day.
Wow, that’s funny, Austin has the exact same mix. What a coincidence. And this is supposed to be a music town…
Yes, but the benefit isn’t for you (dear consumer), it’s for the broadcasters and the RIAA. The broadcasters think they’ll get more listeners and the RIAA gets to charge broadcasters a ton more money. It’s the consumer (again) that gets the shaft.
I already have an FM radio in my car. That’s why I have an iThing.
YAY, one more reason to never consider buying crapple products.
On that note, my Evo already has FM radio, matter of fact, it has three radios. Or at least three radio chips.
It says “iThings,” but the proposed regulation would apply to all mobile devices.
You won’t buy an apple product… because they’re not legally mandated to include an FM tuner that their target customers have never requested?
I know a lot of good reasons to not buy apple, but this isn’t really one of them. and yeah, this counts for all mobile devices, even regular cell phones.
My Sansa Clip+ already has an FM radio built in, and I love it!
If I wanted an FM receiver in my iDevice I’d buy something else. Apple doesn’t include one in their devices for power consumption and aesthetics. You can buy pretty much any other brand and get an FM receiver in your MP3 player.
And they should have a built in cassette player and a jack for my Victrola! (In my best cranky old man voice).
At last, I’ll be able to listen to my Little Orphan Annie while taking the trolley to the malt shop! No more pestering Frankie for the latest secret message after I get home.
Too bad I won’t be able to afford it. I spent all my Green Stamps on Moxie and pomade.
Personally, I’m a Dapper Dan man.
Radio is dead to me. I have no desire to have it foisted upon me.
and your point is? This is exactly what broadcasters want: to force you to listen. You’re not doing it on your own, so now you must be forced into it. Not that it will help their business model.
And what about TV tuners on devices with displays?
I have been known to listen to local radio stations on my iPhone with their Internet stream. It was nice the time one went off the air, I tapped my phone which was attached to my dashboard and connected to the car radio (at the time a Windows mobile phone… Back when the iPhone didn’t do 3G, but same concept) and kept right on listening.
No.
If I want an FM radio, I will seek one out.
I already have enough. They barely get used. There is a reason for that.
Can I just say what idiocy and horrible marketing skills radio station owners and the RIAA have? In the early 1990s they had tech that would have allowed you to pick up information from your FM radio about what services could be found at an interstate exit or that could alert you to traffic conditions. But radio owners would never commit the money to it. And currently they’re pushing digital FM radios, but to find a digital FM radio in your local store is impossible (unless it comes within a Zune). And now they’re trying to force the hands of all MP3 manufacturers? I do have a radio on my Nano and I do enjoy using it from time to time. But that was a choice I made when I purchased it. Seriously, these guys are so anti-consumer/ anti-capitalistic it sickens me.
They can pass a law to force an FM radio into my iPhone when they pass a law forcing non-crappy music into FM radio. I think that’s fair.
You can lead a horse to water…..
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean people will actually use it.
I haven’t listened to FM radio since StaticChannel took over all the stations and coordinated the play lists, and commercial play times. When that happened, everyone had the same 7 songs, or the same repeats from yesteryear, and played their commercials simultaneously so you couldn’t just “channel surf” away from the commercials.
When that happened I got a CD player that could handle MP3′s and multiple discs. When I got bored with that, I got an iPod connection to my stereo…
I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio and NO, I would not be in favor of mandating some crap added to my music player just to prop up a dying industry. Just like the V-chip in TV’s – no one will use it… but we’ll all pay for the privilege of having more useless crap added, w/o the ability to opt out…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but they don’t include a radio transmittor because it already sends/receives Wifi and phone calls. One more antenna just complicates things and leads to more clever engineering designs. Bottom line is that phones get more expensive, and/or you get more dropped calls and general interference.
If it was as easy as putting in a tiny 2 dollar chip, they’d have it already.
IHeartRadio App, and a variety of local station streaming apps on my phone gives me access to streaming radio feeds when I need/want them.
The ONLY possible advantage that it would have would be the ability to have access to emergency information if/when needed, the theory being, if I always have my phone with me I will always have access to the latest news and emergency information in a reliable media. The thing is though, I am usually at work (internet access and stand alone radios and delevisions are easy to find), in (or near) the car (I have my car radio, so I don’t need it on my phone), or at home (again, radio, TV and internet are easy to get).
During a disaster like 9/11 or a major weather event when phone/data networks are overloaded, broadcast media is the most efficient way to disseminate information to the masses, so for that purpose alone I would agree that an FM receiver would be important, but the fact is that we have done without a law that requires an FM receiver in everyone’s phone for +100 years, why is is SO IMPORTANT now?
In a word: No.
No, I bought an iPod/iPhone because I hate commercial radio. HATE HATE HATE their ads and rotations. It’s all emo/nu-metal nickelback crap.
DIAF, RIAA, NAB. Take Clearchannel down with you.
They want it required in all portable electronic devices, not just iCrap.
Just pointing that out because it isn’t obvious from your title and small write up of the subject.
I don’t think there should be a law, but FM radio should be included, it costs very little and is a LIVE source of news and information. I always see having FM radio as a PLUS.
Useful in a disaster situation if FM broadcasting is still operating.
In a real disaster, how likely is it that FM radio will still work?
Yea, except when there’s an actual emergency, no one actually broadcasts anything. Remember?
Yeah, FM/AM would be nice. But the market has already gone, meh, so move on.
There is no law that says the alarm clock by my bed needs to have a builtin radio that can also be tied into the alarm mechanism. At the time there was a need and the people filled in. There was (and still is) no compelling public need/safety issue to force the addition of the radio to my alarm clock.
Do they list a reason why it should be mandated? I do see they mention the Emergency Broadcast, but even then it sounds like they added it as “just another thing.”
Anytime I used a portable device (phone, walkman, etc) with an FM tuner, I got horrible reception. The FM tuner on my Evo requires me to use headphones that double as an antannae, and even then, hardly works
It seems like the RIAA isn’t even trying to hide the fact that they want to add tuners, knowing nobody will use them, just so they can add it to a list of reasons why they can charge more for rights.
What the hell is the RIAA doing now? Can someone please put them out of their misery, like Ol’ Yeller? Please? Next, they’ll be telling us that everyone has to listen to fox news for an hour a day, and creating a mandatory creationism app.
All this says is that these broadcasting Nazis WANT it to happen via a law…not that it is GOING to happen. I WANT it to be a law that says every citizen must pay me $1….but that ain’t happenin’ anytime soon either.