Broadcasting A Radio Station With A Smartphone

Every year the Knight Foundation holds a challenge. This year that challenge was to accelerate media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. The winners received a share of $5 Million in funding and support from the Knight Foundation's network of influential peers and advisers to help their idea progress. Eight mobile ventures won a piece of that grand prize this year in the Knights News Challenge. While the challenge raises some interesting possibilities in itself perhaps the most interesting possibility to surface is that of a Radio Broadcast station conducted with just a Smartphone and a small transmitter.

The idea is titled Root.IO, and it's creator Chris Csikszentmihalyi believes it's possible and is working on three levels to make this a reality. The first level is creating a network system that allows competing organizations to share content.

"We want to take the network effects of the internet and allowing people to share it at the level of radio media."

The idea being that a station with 2G, 3G or 4G connectivity could grab data from a site like bittorent. As community radios host the content they create, and as new stations are created, creators can search the content to find keywords for their use.

The second level is about radio station dynamics. Csikszentmihalyi would like to see radio stations go from only being capable of taking callers and participants via phones to having access to SMS-based voting, conference calling and other methods of interacting with the community.

The final piece, and most important, consists of creating micro-stations. The grand scheme is that anyone with a smartphone running Root.IO software could broadcast with a small transmitter (20-watt(?)) While the quality will not be entirely clear that won't matter says Csikszentmihalyi as most will listen via handsets.