Free and cheerful!!!
Well not exactly free but free in the sense I just discovered that my Yamaha AVR supports free Pandora. So now in addition to playing Pandora through my Echo Dot and Chromecast audio setups, I can play Pandora through my Yamaha setup.
Plus Yamaha just switched over to airable.radio from vtuner. airable.radio appears to be TuneIn's version of vtuner, e.g. a text based interface to play internet streams and podcasts of some sort. So I can play those too.
I need to check to see if free Spotify works on the Yamaha AVR.
From my perspective, all that is left is for Yamaha to expand the capabilities of the Alexa interface. They have a primitive set of capabilities at the moment which also one to turn on the unit, change volume, and switch inputs.
It would be really nice to be able to control the Pandora, airable.radio stations or AM and FM tuner by voice. Plus it would be better if Alexa used the network to transmit commands to the Yamaha AVR instead of Bluetooth.
But all in all a great free find for me.
