BlueBeat to power Motorola's iRadio

Motorola's new music strategy has begun to take a more definite form as it today announced its first music provider for the upcoming iRadio service. Media Rights Technologies will incorporate its BlueBeat music programming technology and service into iRadio devices, allowing customers to download music directly from their PCs and play them over their phones.

Media Rights will supply streaming music channels across different genres for iRadio much like the digital radio streams provided over other carriers' wireless data networks. The difference, however, is the streams will be uploaded from a PC for later listening, not unicast live over the air.

Motorola's attempts to capitalize on digital music have so far fallen flat, a development many critics attribute to its rather half-hearted licensing deal with Apple. Motorola's first iTunes phone, the ROKR, was a disappointment, featuring no new innovative design, storage capacity limited to 100 songs and no support for over-the-air downloads of songs. Its new iTunes phone, which is built on the much sleeker chassis of the SLVR, still failed to impress. Though it comes with expandable memory capacity to 512 MB, the same arbitrary 100-song limit is still enforced and does not support wireless download. Apple appears to have purposely required a small storage capacity on the phones in order to prevent it from being seen as a replacement for its iPod line of music devices.

Motorola consequently has been branching away from the Apple deal. The new version of the ROKR, the E2, doesn't have a trace of iTunes, and it ups the song storage capacity by several orders of magnitude. The iRadio service represents a much greater opportunity for Motorola to create devices that will continue generating revenue for the vendor instead of merely making a feature-rich device. While Motorola has announced no pricing details for iRadio, the service could feasibly bypass the carrier entirely since all music transfer is done by PC cable, allowing Motorola and BlueBeat to create its own revenue stream off of music. U.S. carriers are likely to blanch at such an arrangement, but in Europe or other parts of the world where the cellphone isn't as closely tied to the carrier, such a service could make inroads.