Free Radio on Your Phone, Why You Aren’t Getting It

Imagine this...

It's early June in Northern Colorado. A hail storm/tornado one-two punch rolls through. It's bad. Thankfully, no one dies, but the infrastructure took a beating. Phone towers were damaged, so you have no network. No info. No contact. The power is out. You have no idea what is going on.

Meanwhile, at the radio station, we are firing up generators and making our own power however we can to put a signal on the air, just like we did when the tornado hit in 2008. We were on the air within minutes of losing power. I was seriously impressed.

I was also very focused on gathering information, communicating with our team about what I needed to put out there and in the job of relaying information as it came in.

But people had no power. They were either listening in their cars, or they had another source of power.

However, if their iPhones could download a simple app to trigger the radio receiver in their phone, and they had some battery left, they could have had a radio signal with us telling them everything we knew about the situation.

I think their website sums it up very well.

We shouldn’t be forced to pay to stream local radio – especially in emergencies – it should be FREE and at our fingertips.

I'm not a fan of using scare tactics, and that's really worse case scenario, but I highlight it because it could easily happen in the form of a tornado or blizzard, and it would be pretty stupid for all of us to have a way that we could be in touch (our phones) but we can't because of stubborn phone companies trying to get us to use data for radio, which is not necessary.

Give consumers this one thing. Other apps, other aspects that the smartphone brings, they are worth paying for. But radio has always been free, and should continue to be.

Though it has been farmed out by most companies, some radio (like the broadcast from yours truly) still is of, by and for the market from which it originates. Excuse my language, but when the shit hits the fan, our priority will be to relay information. When the tragedy is over, we revert back to entertainment and infotainment.

Hearing local radio is more than an entertainment stream, and I believe that the phone companies are underserving us by denying access to something that should be easy for our futuristic phones.