[Spirit FM] mikereidis:
I've had conversations with various "radio industry" people, due to Spirit. One was with one of the streaming app companies you mentioned. They'd like to see a convergence of OTA and streaming and were hoping to achieve some deal with me. But I declined and proposed some possible future collaboration in an open effort. Spirit2 is that effort and I'd welcome them to contribute plugins or whatever to support the OEM proprietary APIs I no longer want to deal with in Spirit2. I'd be happy to release the Spirit1 code for that publicly, messy as it is.

Another conversation this week was about RadioDNS. I think it theoretically provides station identification & info capabilities that could be used to converge streaming with Over The Air. I'm not about to jump into streaming apps however, so the open FM API strategy of Spirit2 could allow streaming apps to add OTA capabilities, without dealing with dozens of APIs.

Strong is a strong word. :)

People with the money/data plan, living mostly in well served 1st world metro areas, can and do rely on streaming for their music, entertainment & info needs that can't be accommodated with on device audio files.

Maybe in 10 years, data access will be inexpensive and widely available to 99% of North Americans. Maybe in 15-20 years, AM/FM analog broadcast spectrum will be allocated to other purposes in North America.

But the developing world might stick with it for 30-50 years, and I'm still waiting to see concern for emergencies/natural disasters. I FINALLY found this week 1 persons' comment that Hurricane Sandy made them VERY grateful to have OTA FM on their cell-phone. And some of the cell networks in that area were massively overloaded or dead.

I keep wondering why so many people want FM record. I think it's for music for most, and for some I think there is simplicity in being able to press Record and capture a song. Downloading from bit-torrent sites is complex to average users, and for many, just trying to buy music online is painful, due to geographic & licensing limitations on online music stores.

I speak with several people every day who want their phone to do FM, and I sadly have to tell them their manufacturer/carrier disabled or removed FM capability. Many just assumed that "in this modern age" an FM radio would be a given on any phone claiming to be smart.

AM/FM radio has been ubiqituous, in every car, in every house, in every Walkman & MP3 player pretty much. And everybody knows how to use it; with tuning and volume dials (or common button formats) and a pretty common concept of presets dating back to heavy buttons that physically moved the physical dial/needle. That makes it simple. Younger people (the main target of smartphones) can deal with learning streaming apps. But many older people have smartphones now too, and they want simple and familiar.

I find it interesting that most OEM FM apps are so simple. Most (unlike Spirit) just have a few basic settings. Many don't even show much RDS, no PI/callsign, no PT program type and RT radiotext most often isn't supported. Some only show the 8 character scrolling PS, and you're lucky to find an enable/disable for AF alternate frequency (much more widely used in Europe). Heck, some apps don't even allow you to change band to Europe or Japan.