Good point. I have the fantastic Pure One Flow[1], a radio which looks like any other old-fashioned set, but which picks up local stations on FM, the national and regional stuff over DAB digital, and then connects to wi-fi to receive internet streams from all over the world.
It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.
I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.
This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away.
It's a brilliant device, and so seamless. Switching from the FM community station two streets away to a broadcast from Seattle takes seconds. It'll also connect to a uPnP server and play your own music collection over the LAN.
I prefer a converged solution like this, rather than just picking up live radio online all the time. Listening on FM and DAB saves bandwidth, and a lot of local stations are broadcast in better quality than they're streamed. FM is, to all intents and purposes, lossless.
This is the kind of thing 'everything-in-the-cloud' advocates forget. Broadcasting is just so efficient for sending one programme service out to millions of people. It'll never go away.
[1]: http://www.pure.com/products/product.asp?Product=VL-61558...