For years, the radio industry has watched with worry as consumers snap up all kinds of electronic gadgets — from cellphones to tablets to set-top TV boxes — that deliver seemingly every kind of media but that old standby, terrestrial radio.

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This week, broadcasters won a victory of sorts through a deal with Sprint Nextel, which will make local FM radio signals available on some of its smartphones. It is the first such deal with a phone carrier after years of pressure from the major radio broadcasters. Yet whether customers, and other phone companies, will take to the idea is far from certain.

“My mission is to get radio in 300 million cellphones,” said Jeffrey Smulyan, chief executive of Emmis Communications, who represented a wide group of radio companies in negotiations. “This is a very important start.”

Under the three-year deal, announced on Tuesday, Sprint will make FM radio available on some of its Android and Windows phones, using a tuner application called NextRadio. The app — designed by Emmis, which owns 21 stations around the country — will allow some interactivity with other forms of media on the phone. Mr. Smulyan said he believed that radio listening could increase 15 percent if it were widely available on cellphones.

Both Sprint and the major radio companies will invest in the effort, and they can also share revenue from certain kinds of advertising that make use of the radio and phone features: for example, if a radio ad for a fast-food restaurant is accompanied by a coupon accessible on the phone.

Many cellphones are built with the capacity to receive radio signals, but that feature is typically left dormant by manufacturers and carriers. Sprint’s service will let users receive FM signals through the tuner app.

Phone companies have resisted such deals in the past. But Kevin McGinnis, Sprint’s vice president of product platforms, said that reduced costs and greater earning potential had persuaded the company to take the step. “There was a little bit of convincing that this was not just a need for functionality, that there was a value proposition here,” Mr. McGinnis said.

Sprint, with nearly 56 million customers, is the third largest mobile carrier in the United States, after Verizon and ATT.

Getting a place on cellphones may be a priority for radio broadcasters, but it is unclear how much consumers will be interested. Radio stations are already widely available on phones through streaming apps like TuneIn and Clear Channel Communications’s iHeartRadio, which offer not only local stations but also thousands from around the world.

One benefit to consumers is that a terrestrial radio signal would most likely fall outside of cell carriers’ metered data plans, which charge for data use above a certain threshold.

Yet in a sign of just how much competition the NextRadio feature will face, Sprint announced separately on Tuesday a bundle of streaming apps for Android phones, including music services like iHeartRadio, Spotify, Slacker and Shazam, as well as apps for watching television and movies.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/fm-radio-on-cellphones-long-sought-by-broadcasters-comes-to-sprint/?partner=rss&emc=rss