Thanks for making some sense of this, John. So my Sangean
WFR-28 isn't quite a brick, but with only five presets, pretty
close. The only good news is that I use it mainly when I am on the
computer, so the stations are still available that way.
Worth noting: The vTuner database of stations is still
online
<http://vtuner.com/setupapp/guide/asp/BrowseStations/dynampls.asp?id=91330&k=633a036c872b1cdaba8d3733d7b126d25fae4680a9006ca0a3e2d05f287ef666>
Jerry Berg
At 11:28 PM 5/13/2019, you wrote:
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.)
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