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| Photo by Navigator84 via Creative Commons |
by Peggy Robin
If you are an NPR listener, I’m
sure you know all about The Driveway Moment. It usually happens like this: You’re
driving along, listening to a segment of, say, This American Life or The Moth or Snap Judgment and you are all caught up in
the story, when, before you know it, you have arrived back home in your own
driveway. But you don’t want to get out of your car because that will make you
miss perhaps the next 30 seconds to a minute of the story while you run into
the house, find the nearest radio, and turn it on to resume listening. Yes, you
could stop listening and then later go hunting for the podcast, download it to
your computer, and pick up where you left off, but that would break the flow,
and in many cases, leave you in a frustrated state of suspense. So what do you
do? You sit in your parked car and you don’t move till the story is done. And
if you’ve got a grocery bag with a pint of ice cream in the back seat – let it
melt!
Now there’s a way to listen
uninterrupted. I just found out about this yesterday, while sitting in my
driveway, waiting to get to the end of the Snap Judgment tale of the two
Katie Crouches -- about two women
living in the same city, sharing many other attributes, who kept being mistaken
for one another. As soon as the show was over but before I could switch the car
radio off, I caught a promo for the NPR One app, which gives the user access to
NPR content through a smartphone. Now, I knew (or thought I knew) about this app: I understood it to be a Pandora-like
service that steered the user to content presumably in keeping with the user’s
tastes, based on the user’s listening history. That held no interest for me;
just the opposite – I like to select my own shows and I very much dislike the
idea of letting an app send me to whatever IT thinks I will like, based on a
computer algorithm. That’s mildly creepy, to my way of thinking.
But that’s not all it does, I
learned. It does something much simpler, and far more useful: It lets me listen
to my local NPR station live, immediately. So the moment I park the car, I pull
out my smartphone, tap on the NPR One app, and tap on “listen” and I’m hearing
exactly what NPR is playing, without a break. So I can turn the volume up,
stick the phone in my pocket, and unload my groceries, all while the show goes
on.
Previously, I had something
similar, but more difficult to manage. It was a radio app (TuneIn Radio) that
gave me access to all my local stations through my phone. But by offering a
choice of all the stations, it slowed down the selection process. By the time
you got to the NPR station, you’d missed a bit of the show. The NPR One app
avoids that problem by taking you straight to your local NPR station -- no
chance of stumbling across something else
I’ve also learned that the NPR
One app is not so new. It’s been around for a while – so perhaps I should have
known about it before. But like Dorothy in Oz, tapping the heels of her ruby
slippers and wishing herself home, I had
no idea I had the power all along. And if I didn’t know, I’m betting lots of
others didn’t know this, either….there’s no app like NPR One.
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Still Life with Robin is
published on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays
(and occasionally on Sundays).
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