Former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson has entered the ever-growing online music streaming industry. Uberstations, which launched 6/20, aggregates streams of traditional radio stations, which users can listen to from the site for free. The company directly competes with TuneIn and iHeartRadio.
A unique feature of the service is that listeners can see in real-time what’s playing on thousands of stations to identify what’s of most interest. There’s a comprehensive guide to radio showing listeners what’s playing across the entire radio spectrum. An intuitive player displays and plays every station with a single click. Finally a recommendation engine steers people to music or shows of interest.
Thousands of music and talk stations are monitored in real-time at UberStations. Users can see what songs are playing on stations in their area and see instantly when songs change with a pleasing fade in-and-out display. For talk stations users see what shows are playing. By default users are shown stations in their local region, but they can also search for stations in other areas and monitor what is playing in those areas.
Clicking a station plays the stream in a web browser. In an industry first, both MP3 and AAC stations stream directly into the browser using HTML5 with a Flash fallback providing a universal player for all popular radio stations.
When users select a song or show to listen to, a recommendation engine searches music and shows playing on other AM/FM stations. Up to 20 other stations which may be of interest are displayed along with what is current on those stations. UberStations is ideal for both music fans and talk fans. Music listeners can request an unlimited number of recommendations until they find something of interest to listen to. Those selecting a sports, politics, or public radio show will see other related talk shows on at that time they can listen to.
“Remember when you had to scan through each TV channel to find something to listen to because there was no interactive guide? That’s how radio still is today, but UberStations changes that by giving users a comprehensive real-time guide to songs and shows that are playing across the entire radio world all of which play in a uniform experience,” Says Robertson.
See Robertson demonstrate UberStations here:
Uberstations, which Robertson is funding himself, tracks about 14,000 stations, mostly in the US. TuneIn streams about 70,000 stations and has 40 million monthly active users worldwide.
Streaming music online is becoming an increasingly crowded space, with Apple recently launching its iTunes Radio and Google doing the same with its “All Access Music.”
