For years, he has been on a mission to enable cell phones to be used as FM radios.
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The email added that the change to activate the FM radios of smartphones will be made by the smartphone manufacturers themselves. “We hope other carriers will follow suit”, WALDEN said during the hearing.
According to NextRadio, it will work with AT&T and its smartphone maker partners to activate FM radio and NextRadio on all possible devices, with the activation of the feature to be expected for all Android smartphones that will be newly released next year, with the chance that some devices could be ready by the end of the year.
You might think that conventional radio is becoming less relevant as time marches on, but AT&T begs to differ.
Station owners such as Emmis have been pushing carriers to activate the chip. But AT&T does not believe so and will provide its customers with radio services. NextRadio also uses a sliver of wireless data to give consumers an interactive experience, allowing them to do everything from tracking which songs local stations are playing at any given moment to providing feedback on a track to buying concert tickets.
Beginning in 2016, AT&T phones with built in FM chips will start being activated, and AT&T is working with manufacturers to have FM chips installed in future phones. This implies users will be able to listen to live radio on their devices anywhere without consuming any data.
And streaming also is expensive for radio operators. And, the existing SPRINT deal remains active and in place.
And, since NextRadio uses your phone’s FM transmitter instead of your data plan, you can listen to a lot more music for a lot longer, battery-wise.
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The US wireless carriers’ refusal to activate the FM radios in smartphones has always been kind of a mystery, since the cost to the carriers is next to nothing. “That’s about as far into the future as I’m willing to predict”, he said.
