Brian McConnell, who is always pushing the envelope on phone hacking, has come up with an interesting new service for translating internet radio and podcast channels to what he’s calling “stream codes,” equivalent to the call letters of a radio station. He wrote in email:
We (Open Communication Systems) quietly updated our stream codes service to work with any mobile device.
The idea behind Stream Codes is to make tuning internet audio/video content as simple as tuning a channel. KQED, for example, is 5733, which spells KQED on a phone style keypad, which can be easily incorporated into any consumer electronics form factor (boomboxes, PVRs, table top radios, etc). When you tune a stream code, the device does a web service or ENUM query and gets an RSS file with a list of live and archived media available for a given provider. We’ll be licensing this to CE vendors as a way to easily and cheaply embed internet media in virtually any device or form factor, including low cost products designed for mass market retail. If you’re not quite “getting it”, imagine that the phone style dialpad is on your PVR remote). When you want to watch HBO Latino, you dial HBOL (or 4265). It’s a simple design/memory trick, but makes the whole system easy to use, as content providers can choose stream codes that are easy to remember, spell something close to their name, etc. We then just remap the code to an RSS document that has all of live and archived programs associated with the code.
We recently developed a mobile friendly version of the service, which you can try by going to {streamcode}.radiohandi.com, e.g. http://kqed.radiohandi.com. You’ll see a lite html view of what’s currently available (live streams, podcasts, videos). Then click on a link to pull a live stream or podcast. If your phone does not support streaming, you can make a standard voice call and listen to the live stream. This will work on pretty much any mobile device, and a handset manufacturer can easily do some additional integration work, for example, to hide the web URL lookup behind that standard dialing interface (e.g. just dial a stream code and press a music note button or softkey).
Our primer at guide.radiohandi.com does a nice job of explaining how this approach can be integrated into pretty much any device or form factor, and allows for any combination of amateur and professional content sources. We currently have about 2000 radio stations indexed for proof of concept. The service is also open for public registration. We’ve been working on this for a while now, and with the mobile interface, we can reach any device from high-end A/V gear to mobile phones.
Our goal with this is ambitious: to create a open, global channel map that is easy to incorporate into pretty much any device or form factor, and to make consuming internet media so easy that non-technical users can figure it out. For example, you’d go to Circuit City, buy a table top radio, plug it in. A little booklet packaged with the radio has 1000s of codes for popular content sources (full guide online of course). No media center or special software required.
P.S. I added some more stream codes to demo over-the-air podcasting to mobiles
carep.radiohandi.com –> KQED California Report (podcast)
bbcw.radiohandi.com –> BBC World Report (podcast + live feed)
kqed.radiohandi.com –> KQED radio (live feed, windows media/phone)There are a couple of minor issues, but it’s basically working now. If you have a PDA/phone that can play mp3s, picture what the UI will be like if the manufacturer does some minor integration work. e.g. you dial 2229 (BBCW), press a music note button instead of SEND. Behind the scenes, the phone fetches 2229.radiohandi.com/rss and displays a menu of options for you.