Yesterday, at the Village gym, tired of my normal workout playlist, I brought up JungleTrain on the iPod Touch.
My favorite, niche internet radio station, streaming from somewhere in Europe, picked up by a device in my pocket, on a random treadmill in Minnesota.
Exactly the audio I was looking for. No ads, no data charge. Just the price of the gym membership.
This is another reason1 why the iPod Touch is more of a game changer to me than the iPhone.
Strangely, the latest iPod Nano and Zune ship with broadcast radio receivers (FM and HD respectively).
Elsewhere in radio land, SiriusXM is trading at $0.55/share and has until March 2010 to trade above $1 or be delisted off the NASDAQ
1. Earlier this year I mentioned how the iPod Touch made re-think my mobile phone service. Both of these experiences are rolled into the larger idea that:
“if I’m not within a wifi network, I’m probably driving or otherwise not able to talk.”
.
Amen! I love my i’Touch.
I will add that I had an XM receiver in the car, but once they merged with Sirius, they canceled the “family plan” that I used via some friends. Then someone broke my car window to steal it (probably thought it was a GPS). I never bothered to replace the receiver.
Despite XM having decent programming, it’s way too hard to compete with iTunes. Podcasts and other on-demand programming just rocks in a way that broadcast cannot.
I don’t have cable or a watch a TV save when we rent a DVD (a physical medium; how quaint). And we’ve ditched that with the season pass to iTunes for the commercial-free content that we want. Broadcast media is going the way of the newspaper. Opt-in media is where it’s at.