There's many things to be wary of about internet radios:
- The UI: the little LCD screens can be terrible to set anything on and jog dials are a clumsy way to set up. Just imagine setting your wifi password with a jog dial and you get the idea. This means searching for stations is painful if that feature even exists.
- The station database. Internet radio is often fragmented, because the manufacturers are fighting against the broadcasters. Broadcasters want people to listen on little Flash applets in their browser window so they can push ads. To hook the stream into an internet radio (which runs neither Windows nor IE nor Flash) means reverse engineering the website to work out the stream URL... but such stream links often break.
Is the database well-structured, and is it easy to find things? How do you get things added? Does anyone actually care about it? Stations might listed as things like:
!!!111 HITS (lots of !!! to get to the top of the list)
103.6 Love FM (have to scroll through a lot of these to get to the interesting stuff) Alan's Rantz (internet-only bedroom radio station) BBC Radio Somewhere AAC BBC Radio Somewhere WMA (station in database twice) Elsewhere BBC Radio (sorting order broken) KAAA New York KAAB Kentucky Bluegrass ... KZZZ Alaska (there are /lots/ of American Wxxx and Kxxx stations)Unless the database is well-curated, it's often full of dross.
- Do they interact with more complex services like BBC iPlayer? Can you access the recorded programmes, not just the current broadcasts? Can you do the same for stations not explicitly supported (eg if the Voice of North Korea decides to offer listen on demand, do I depend on the radio manufacturer to support that station, or can I just point the radio at the RSS feed?)
- Can you use a third-party database? If the manufacturer gets bored, the stream database will bit-rot very quickly, even if the servers stay up.
- Does your idea of support match the manufacturer's?
My salutory lesson is I have two radios based on a platform from a Cambridge company called Reciva. These are/were fitted to many models from Roberts, Pure, Dixons, Oxx, BT, and many other brands. The UI is clunky, finding stations is a pain, the build quality is poor, and Reciva have basically said that 5 years is sufficient product lifetime and they've given up. The database servers are still up, but they put little effort into maintaining it and it's a mess. But I needn't worry about that, because both my radios have died anyway (BGA soldering fault).
So, my lessons would be:
- Get a touchscreen. It so much easier to use than an awkward jog dial
- Buy a radio on an extensible platform (eg Android). If the vendor gives up, you can switch to a different radio app.
- Put up with the fragmentation. One size fits all, doesn't. For an easy life, you might end up listening to BBC streams with the iPlayer app, Brazillian radio with a Brazillian radio app, etc. If you're interested in obscure stations you can guarantee that some won't be listed in the mainstream apps.
I haven't looked at the current range of wifi radios in too much detail, but I think I'd be wary in general. I think a tablet or a phone in a docking station with speakers might be an approach worth looking at rather than a 'kitchen radio' box. But check that a slower device can actually keep up with the streams.
Theo