iTunes Radio?
Engadget has come across something of interest on AT&T's website. AT&T has just added an international data plan (to ease the $3000 phone bills one would imagine), but they use iTunes Radio as an example of usage. AT&T claims that 20 minutes of listening to iTunes Radio uses up 20MB of your data plan. Very interesting considering that iTunes Radio doesn't exist. Might this be a new feature in the rumored iTunes 7.5?Update: Before 15 more people point out the Radio option in the desktop iTunes, yes I am aware of that. Nowhere is that functionality called 'iTunes Radio,' though, and it doesn't interact with the iPhone.
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Engadget has come across something of interest on AT&T's website. AT&T has just added an international data plan (to ease the $3000...
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Yea well maybe its not labelled as "iTunes Radio" but most people would have worked out that they were the same thing.
November 04 2007 at 5:54 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhat about HD radio reception? The chip in the iPhone may be capable of it.
http://artoftheiphone.com/2007/09/08/iphone-hd-radio-and-itunes-tagging/
Your math is just a little off. Remember that songs are encoded at kilobits per second not kilobytes per second. So, realistically, when AT&T says you are getting 20 minutes for 20MB, you are getting 160mbits. So, in a minute you can use 8mbits or .133mbits a second, or, in terms of kilobits, 133kilobits per second. So, in essence, AT&T would be saying that it is 128kbps encoded music running over EDGE, giving us a data download of roughly 1MB per minute.
Don't have an iPhone yet. Are you guys saying that if I pointed the
iPhone Safari browser to an internet radio station that one can find at
http://yp.shoutcast.com for instance, that the iPhone/Safari/iTunes
will not play back the stream like Safari/iTunes will on a Mac?
That sucks if it's true. I had planned on streaming my home radio
station to my car using Nicecast to my iPhone when I bought one of
the next versions of the iPhone.
Dan
Parsnip, I think you are confusing your bytes and bits. 20mins of 32kbps is 4.9152MB. 20MB for 20mins is 136.53kbps.
November 02 2007 at 10:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyok... some quick math: a 32k mp3 stream for 60 seconds is 1.92 Megs a minute (32 * 60). At 20 minutes that's 38.4 Megs (20 * 1.92).
This almost 40 Megs or twice the amount of bandwith they mention. Doesn't sound like streaming radio to me.
So eager to pick up the rumor and thereby missing the real story...
Engadget reported (where's tuaw?) that AT&T introduced two new international roaming plans for the iPhone.
The great news (Engadget missed that one, too) is that these new plans can be added and dropped on a month-to-month basis unlike before, where one had to sign up for a whole year.
Let's not forget the references to a "mobile radio" app in some plists in the iphone:
http://www.iphoneology.com/2007/07/30/iphone-firmware-hints-at-new-apps-widgets/
@thethirdmoose:
it would actually be about 166 kilobIts per second, not 16 kilobYtes per second.
I find it interesting that no one really commented on the fact that Apple added many radio stations to iTunes in the 7.4 revision.
I also find it interesting that many of these new stations are coming from http://pri.kts-af.net. When you type that into your browser it says: Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server. Apache/1.3.33 Server at tunes.apple.com Port 80
I also find it interesting that http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306608 mentions listening to internet radio and podcasts at Starbucks.
All of this tells me that Apple is going to have a WiFi radio app on the iPhone and the iPod touch in an upcoming revision to the iPhone/iPod touch software. :-)
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