From Jerry Del Colliano's Inside Music Media blog: "It’s easy to get lost in all the drama surrounding the Congressional Royalty Board battle now going on between SoundExchange (referred to henceforth as 'The Executioner') and Internet radio.

"There are plenty of issues there and I don’t think they will satisfactorily get worked out in the coming months. 'The Executioner' wants to avoid the wrath of Congress and streamers want to wake Congress up and get them to act in the name of fair royalty rates. I see an unfortunate compromise coming that resolves nothing and once again leaves Internet radio in limbo in a year or two. But we’ll see.

"What I see for the future of Internet radio is not so much 24-hour streaming — although no question we’ll have plenty of that. I see delayed listening programs delivered by the Internet to mobile devices and computers. There will be 15-minutes shows, three hour broadcasts... The 24-hour broadcast standard may disappear.

"The next generation isn’t going to listen to radio on the go the way radio and satellite companies hope they will. These Gen Y’ers have shorter attention spans. They will waltz in and out of musical genres and content of interest...

"The big broadcaster of tomorrow — online or on land — will be broadcasting thousands and thousands of streams, not a handful of 24/7 stations. The niches will be very small indeed. I was born in Hoboken, NJ and love all things about that little town that Sinatra made famous. If there are 1,000 people like me, you could monetize that 'station' — something that terrestrial broadcasting could never do...

"Internet radio has been a smash hit already with lots of obstacles in its path.

"Internet radio doesn’t have universal portability (as terrestrial radio does).

"Internet radio doesn’t have a fair royalty agreement (like radio currently has but may not if 'The Executioner' gets its way).

"Internet radio is not run by seasoned professionals (maybe that’s an advantage in some ways).

"I’d like to see terrestrial and satellite get into the Internet radio business. I plan to. Many of my friends are moving to that space as well. Cyberspace is friendly to radio program directors.

"The future is Internet radio."

Read the entire post at Inside Music Media.

From the Washington Post: "Sprint has a vision for the next generation of on-the-go Web surfing, and it has nothing to do with cellphones or WiFi-powered coffee shops.

"The Reston wireless provider, which now refers to itself as a mobile-broadband pioneer, is placing bets on a souped-up wireless technology called WiMax and has enlisted the help of Google as a first partner to spark excitement around the forthcoming launch.

"Under a revenue-sharing deal announced yesterday, Sprint would provide the WiMax technology... Google, in turn, would provide search capabilities and its already popular applications such as e-mail, instant messaging and online calendars, on Sprint's WiMax network...

"Sprint said the WiMax service would be available in Washington, Baltimore and Chicago this year, with nation wide rollout beginning sometime in the second quarter of next year...

"[Sprint] plans to work with manufacturers to embed WiMax technology in electronics devices and sell access cards that would deliver the wide-range Internet signal to existing devices...

"[P]roducts such as music players or portable video players, which connect to a computer to access songs or video clips from the Internet, could be built with WiMax chips that allow users to bypass the computer and download new content from the back seat of a car or in a Metro tunnel, for example.

Read the entire story at the Washington Post.

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