Late last week, I speculated in a comment in the SWLing Post that a May 1 vTuner 11 hour outage and a subsequent and sudden decision by several of its former internet radio manufacturer users to drop and replace it was possibly related to a financial dispute of some kind.
One of the radio manufacturers claimed that while vTuner had been a reliable partner for two decades, subsequent management was stating that it could not guarantee that the service would be continuing indefinitely due to inadequate funding. That manufacturer implied that the outage, a demand from vTuner for increased payment and the claimed potential for continued service interruptions and even cancellation were related incidents. An article dated May 12, 2019 on radiovisie.eu in Dutch fills in a lot of the blanks. While vTuner has had the most accurate and reliable catalog of internet radio streams worldwide, companies had been starting to abandon it. The current management of vTuner, also in a comment on the SWLing Post, claimed that former employees are pirating its information and poaching its clients. The Post expressed frustration with the low rate of payment and increasing expenses. Bose and Yamaha ended their agreements with vTuner in 2018. But the big blow came when Frontier Silicon, which has been an important development partner for vTuner for two decades, determined that vTuner was to blame for the May 1 11 hour outage that affected hundreds of thousand IP radio devices. The dispute apparently escalated in subsequent days to the point where Frontier decided to immediately and without prior warning switch to a new provider. That provider is a little known entity called airable.radio and offers far less in terms of user flexibility at least at this point in time. For its part, Frontier claims it had to move quickly to avoid the devices of its clients becoming completely unusable. vTuner claims it will probably have to close down soon given the current situation. Its CEO claims that, “The electronic consumer companies want everything for free, no matter how bad the quality of service is.” The move to airable.radio does represent a cheapening of the internet radio experience, a regrettable development given the expense involved in purchasing one of these devices. The article in radiovisie.eu says that there is increasing pressure on manufacturers to give users the option of selecting their own portals and using multiple portals instead of having to rely on the manufacturer’s choice of portals. This situation is a watershed moment for IP radio in general and internet radio manufacturers in particular. Absent a better solution that equals the expectations of those paying high prices for these quality units, this sector could be in dire trouble especially considering the competition presented by other radio playing devices. (There are two informative articles on this topic in radiovisie.eu which, in order to read, the reader must first translate the Dutch language articles to English. The airable.radio website appears to be only a placeholder with no information or details about its database.) _______________________________________________ Internetradio mailing list Internetradio@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/internetradio To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to internetradio-requ...@hard-core-dx.com?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above.