Tuesday, March 25, 2014

iTunes Radio expands its horizons, adds NPR station



Apple’s music streaming service gets the popular public radio station, which will be available for streaming 24 hours a day.





There’s been a lot of talk recently about Apple’s plans to improve iTunes Radio. The Pandora rival has only been out for a few months but it has already clinched a respectable market share. Could moving beyond music be the next crucial step for iTunes Radio?

iTunes Radio will now feature the NPR station. Users who wish to add it to their list simply need to search for it in iTunes Radio. Available all day, the station will offer live news. Apart from that, it will also bring pre-recorded segments of popular NPR shows such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Streams of NPR’s member stations from across the U.S. will also be added to iTunes Radio in the near future.*NPR’s vice president of digital media, Zach Brand, says that this is “just the start” of what’s to come.

This is a very clear signal of the direction Apple is taking with iTunes Radio, its sets the service apart from its rivals. In the coming months Apple is expected to make some radical changes. It’s possible that it might pluck iTunes Radio from the native Music app on iOS and introduce it as a standalone app in iOS 8. This will allow Apple to market it in a much better way, and even make changes frequently without having to update the entire core OS. There’s also the possibility that the company might launch iTunes Radio on other platforms, a standalone app would certainly be the first step towards that destination.

Recently it has also been rumored that Apple is looking to complement iTunes Radio with an on-demand music streaming service. The company is reportedly in talks with senior music label executives about this Spotify rival. If the deal goes through, we will probably be hearing about it at WWDC 2014, an annual conference where Apple makes most of its software related announcements.

Source: NPR



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