• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 6, 2006

Clear Channel Radio's flagship station in New York, Z100, today will launch a new mobile radio service for cell phones. The service will allow users to receive streams of radio shows on their mobile phones, and also listen to tracks on demand.

The subscription service, available to Cingular cell phone users across the country for $2.99 a month, is the first step in a planned rollout of streaming and on-demand programming from about 100 stations nationwide over the next year. It's not yet clear when the service will be available to mobile users who are customers of companies other than Cingular.

The service allows users to find song titles and artist names for the most recent 10 songs, make requests via phone, receive text messages when a request is about to be played, and listen to podcasts of celebrity interviews, said Jeff Littlejohn, Clear Channel Radio's executive vice president of distribution development. Users also can download wallpapers from different DJs, access traffic information in text format, and participate in a popular Z100 Web site contest, "Jump or Dump," where participants rate photos submitted by Z100 listeners.

The new Clear Channel service will be supported by an official sponsor whose promotion appears on the phone display screen during the "interstitial" download periods that occur as users navigate between menus. The first sponsor for the Z100 streaming program is DKNY Jeans, Littlejohn said. The company will transmit fashion tips with the DKNY logo to cell phones, and users can also download DKNY wallpaper.

Littlejohn said it's hard to predict how many listeners the new service has, because no other radio station has introduced streaming and on-demand service on such a large scale. However, Littlejohn observed that "Cingular, the carrier we're initially launching with, has 50 million subscribers, and Z100 is the most-listened to station in the country with an audience of about 2.5 million. If we got even one percent of that it would be quite a large number."

For the immediate future, the Clear Channel mobile service will offer little in the way of Web surfing functionality, Littlejohn said, "because we wanted to develop an application that worked on as many phones as possible. When you introduce more advanced Web functions you really begin to dial down the number of users you can reach."