Cridland: "Google speakers go quiet for radio"

From James Cridland's "Radioland": Here’s something seemingly unreported by any of the radio trades - the great Google smart speaker bug of 2025, which wiped thousands of radio stations off these smart speakers for weeks. As I understand it, here’s the story - Google rolled out new firmware to their smart speakers and Nest displays about four weeks ago. This new firmware had the side-effect of breaking support for streaming AAC, a format of audio streaming that many radio stations use (higher quality at a lower bandwidth than MP3). So, asking for “Hey, Google, play FM105” resulted in nothing working, as some aggregator apps have mentioned online. It was a worldwide glitch, and affected every radio station streaming in AAC variants.

(James Cridland's "Radioland") Read more