Over the past year or so, however, there has been talk about a new take on another technology -- Internet radio -- that has the potential to disrupt both the world of satellite radio and good old terrestrial radio. It's called WiFi radio, or wireless Internet radio, and some say its time could be coming soon, thanks to cheaper radio chips and the increasing penetration of public wireless networks.

Internet radio has been around since the Web first started becoming popular in the late 1990s, thanks in large part to the development of the MP3 music-compression standard. When high-speed connections started to become commonplace, people began to share the songs they had downloaded, setting up what amounted to private radio networks with software such as Winamp.

Traditional radio stations also started streaming their music over the Web, and still do, although in many cases their ability to do so has been hampered by copyright regulations, which restrict what they can play over the Internet. (Unfortunately, the licensing agreements that allow radio stations to play songs on the radio don't always allow them to "broadcast" the same music over the Internet.)

As high-speed Internet access has spread, so have the number of sources for online radio, including hundreds of informal "channels" devoted to different styles of music, all available for free. And as wireless networking has become more popular over the past couple years, people have started looking for an easy way to stream their digital music throughout their homes.

That has led to products such as the Roku SoundBridge and Sonos sound systems, both of which connect to your home network and PC, and can stream music to speakers in other rooms or to other computers and stereo equipment. A British company called Acoustic Energy came out with an Internet radio device last year that is just like a high-end stereo component, except that it pulls Internet radio stations in via any open WiFi connection.

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