March 7, 2005

Chasers spend a lot of time forecasting the future of entertainment hubs in the living room. But let’s take a stroll outside and slide into the car, where there’s plenty of new activity to monitor. “Car convergence” is worth watching, especially as drivers spend their time behind the wheel searching for programming beyond terrestrial radio, compact discs and audio books.

Alpine Electronics has developed a multimedia system that ties together satellite radio, iPods, even television content, according to an article in Business 2.0. For information providers, this could be the real start of audio programming for time-starved readers.

“Content will be coming from everywhere,” says Stephen Witt, an Alpine vice president. “The key issue is, How can we make it easy to manage in a moving car?”

As our readers spend more time commuting to work, they’re looking for something to amuse/entertain/inform them (unless they’ve got a cell phone earbud jammed in their ear). That commute time sucks away time spent with other media, especially reading the paper.


Forget about hiring an actor to read the newspaper [see the MobileSoft effort from SF Gate back in 2002]. This is about podcasting niche content such as entertainment coverage from your site and much more.

[Check out this recent post from Chaser Howard Finberg for more about the future of radio.]

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I've tracked multimedia and online publishing strategies since 1996 as a trade reporter and editor and as an analyst/editor/conference planner/member support guy at NAA. Now…
Rob Runett

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