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I don't get it, why do manufacturers bother adding an FM chip if they never activate it?
by laurent123456 10y ago
I don't get it, why do manufacturers bother adding an FM chip if they never activate it?
- Synaesthesia 10y agoI think it comes with the SOC
- expertentipp 10y agoEach European country has a national broadcaster and collects radio/TV license fee (some are less strict about it than the others). I wouldn't be surprised if national broadcasters or fee collectors were pushing for presence of this chip in mobiles so no one can use the excuse "I don't have radio/TV so why should I pay the license?".
- kalleboo 10y agoMany of them already achieve the same result by saying "you can receive our online streams so pay up", I don't think underfunded public broadcasters in Europe are busy bribing chipset manufacturers to add features their customers don't want
- tremon 10y agoThe national or regional broadcaster is also a designated news source in case of emergency. If this were true, I would rather expect the rationale to be about emergency coordination than broadcast licensing.
- kalleboo 10y agoIt's built-in to the LAN chips - you buy one chip that does WiFi and Bluetooth and it also happens to have FM support because presumably it's easy enough to just toss in there (and there's probably enough demand for the feature among low-end devices)
- TickleSteve 10y agosupport costs... which in this case is probably negligible but they will still get calls complaining that it doesn't work.
- kuschku 10y agoWell, because the same chip is used in devices that do activate it?