T-Mobile might be working on adding TuneIn radio to Music Freedom
When T-Mobile first launched Music Freedom as part of its Uncarrier initiative last year, the carrier allowed its customers to vote on which music streaming services they’d like to see added next. Customers quickly voted up TuneIn Radio as a favorite, although T-Mobile has been largely silent on whether it has any plans to actually add this particular service to Music Freedom.
Music Freedom refers to the fact that T-Mobile no longer counts the most popular music streaming services against customers’ data buckets.
This might all be changing soon, though, as a small group over at Howard Forums have noticed that TuneIn Radio no longer appears to be drawing from their limited data buckets. One user wrote:
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I’ve been testing TuneIn Radio on different days and it doesn’t appear to be counting against my data when I check with #web#. I.e. I used it driving around for about 2 hours, and it didn’t use any data. I even checked the detailed usage on the website, and nothing besides the usual <1mb chunks was listed on that day. I also tested tonight again and after 15 minutes, it didn’t use any data at all.
Another said:
Very cool! Testing it out now and so far no real change in my usage. I’m still a bit skeptical so I might as well keep it playing for a bit, but so far so good!
The difficulty in adding TuneIn Radio is due to the app sourcing streams from so many different places. While Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, and others all use the same servers to stream music, TuneIn Radio has hundreds or thousands of different servers it streams from. To complicate matters even more, these servers are constantly changing, with new ones being added and old ones deleted. It would be near impossible for T-Mobile to whitelist all of them, unless it is making some kind of deal with the developers of TuneIn Radio, in order to get its most up to date server list whenever changes are made.
In any case, it looks like T-Mobile is finding a way to do this. It will be interesting to see if T-Mobile eventually lists TuneIn officially as a supported app.
In the mean time, try it out yourself. Is TuneIn deducting from your data bucket on T-Mobile?
[Howard Forums]
