Sprint To Offer Streaming Music Feature

[Kent Pribbernow]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.com.com/Sprint+offers+streaming+mobile+music/2100-1027_3-5496081.html?tag=nefd.top' target='_blank'>http://news.com.com/Sprint+offers+streaming+mobile+music/2100-1027_3-5496081.html?tag=nefd.top</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Sprint on Monday plans to launch a new service for streaming music over the airwaves to cell phones, powered by a company that provides digital music to cable and satellite TV subscribers. Under the terms of the deal, Music Choice is providing a range of six streaming music channels organized by genre, as well as some music videos and artist interviews for Sprint subscribers who pay about $6 a month. If that sounds a little bit like the radio, it's not entirely a bad comparison, said Dave Del Beccaro, CEO of Music Choice."</i><br /><br />Hmm. So basically this is something akin to satellite radio via cell phone. Interesting idea, but I don't see this taking off. The US Cell phone market is still too primitive, and the ability to take advantage of this new service will be hampered by the hardware of its user base. For example, if my cell phone doesn't have a headphone jack, am I supposed to hold the stupid thing up to my ear and listen that way? And what about minute by minute charges..am I eating into my free minutes every time I access the service?

[Zack Mahdavi]

I think this feature will have a lot of promise. As a student, I like to work in the library a lot, and when I'm fed up of the songs on my iPod (it only has a 10GB drive, you know... :wink: ), I'll pull out my Pocket PC and stream some shoutcast stations wia the campus WiFi network.

So there's a few hurdles I'm hoping Sprint has avoided.

First, sound quality.. I can stream my shoutcast stations at 128kbps, and I'm hoping the Sprint service will be able to do the same. Those 19kpbs stations always sound horrible to me.

Second, cost... will this be an additional service with an additional monthly charge, or will it be included in their "Vision" package with many a certain amount of listening hours included? It better not go against my minutes... that would be bad.

Finally, how exactly are you supposed to browse all the stations on your cell phone? If it takes me 5 minutes to get to the station I want by using the built-in phone web browser, no thanks.

All said, I don't even have a Sprint phone, but maybe it's one of those "useful" cell phone features. Better than T-Mobile's new "Caller Tunes," that's for sure.

However, I think the biggest feature all Americans want and the cell phone companies have failed to deliver is: reception! Maybe they should start charging for better reception.... they could make it a feature... I can hear them say it now: "Would you like to add on our new 'Supersize my reception' feature for an additional $10 a month?"