With over 400 channels of news, sports, and entertainment, AudioFeast has launched what it calls the first portable Internet radio service. And the company plans to add portable music to its subscription service come October.
AudioFeast has engaged over 70 media partners, including such heavyweights as A&E, Bloomberg Radio, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, National Public Radio, SportsNews Radio, and The Wall Street Journal Radio Network. They plan to add over a hundred channels of music in the coming weeks, including pop, jazz, electronica, trance, R&B, rock, alternative, classical, and more.
Announcing the new subscription service September 8 at DEMOMobile2004, AudioFeast co-founder/chief executive Tom Carhart said their aim was to re-ignite the passion you once felt for radio programming and bring it portably in high fidelity. A single year’s subscription for the basic news/sports/entertainment service will cost $49.95.
"Although the market for MP3 players and online music services has undergone explosive growth in recent years, the task of searching for compelling content and loading it on a portable player is still a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive process for consumers,” Carhart said. “Unlike track-at-a-time downloads, AudioFeast delivers a vast library of radio programming that is constantly refreshed, affordable, and ready to listen to whenever you are."
DEMOmobile executive producer Chris Shipley said the MP3 market has growth potential far beyond music, currently its most identifiable product. "As MP3 players become a common feature of PDAs, SmartPhones, slim devices, and even cars,” Shipley said, “demand will build for a variety of audio programming options. AudioFeast is well-positioned to take advantage of this trend."
AudioFeast based their broadcast platform on next-generation peer-to-peer technology, its media distribution system Virtual Broadcast Network delivering radio to a variety of portable products over several networks, and touting greater efficiency, reliability, and lower cost than standard distribution.
“In essence, it allows [us] to offer the audio equivalent of cable television for MP3 players… Ease of use is built into every feature of the service,” the company said. “From automatic content transfer to portable devices to the way content is aggregated for easy browsing, AudioFeast eliminates consumer work. Whenever the PC is on, an application runs in the background to ensure that programming choices are automatically refreshed and available for instant consumption.”
Consumers can adjust bandwidth use, disc storage, and several other technical functions, but AudioFeast is betting they’ll be most impressed by interactive features such as easy skipping and pausing of programs or songs, and enjoying them from their desktop or transferring to select MP3 players for portable entertainment.
