Wednesday, March 18, 2009

What's on TV? Radio, actually...

{A} and I are big fans of NPR (especially shows like "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "This American Life"). Usually we listen in the car, since we get pretty bad reception at our house (yes, I am too lame/lazy to put up a decent FM antenna to solve that...)

I was quite pleased a few weeks ago to find a nifty Public Radio application for my iPhone which let us stream the radio over the Internet. We have a line-in on our stereo, so it's easy to plug the iPhone in and have the radio shows audible through a few rooms in the house now. But it turns out there is an even cooler way (I think) to listen to the radio... Use your TV!

To be more precise, cable TV. Our cable feed includes a lot of radio stations, and the audio quality is better than most Internet streams. {A} discovered the KUOW channel, and we've since used it to listen to a few shows. But what makes it really cool is that if you have a DVR, you can now record specific shows that you might otherwise miss... Not all shows have podcasts available, so this seems like a good way to "time-shift" radio shows.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There is no cable or atteane-based TV available in my home. Instead I have a satelitte dish with a freeview converter box which provides all the BBC radio stations and many others. It's awesome. I also bought a hand-held radio that is both wind-up and solar-powered for travelling. It's awesome. Music, Theatre, Politics in any room no cables and no infrastructure electricity generation!