This might be partially baked. All I am proposing is that the IEEE declare a standard protocol for bluetooth audio transmission. Anyone making bluetooth headphones, etc would have to follow the protocol. Thus, every headphone would be compatible with every transmitter, and so on. The user would get the choice of two audio-reception modes: secure and unsecure.
But why? Think about the possibilities. If a bunch of your friends all had bluetooth headphones, you could all listen in on the same audio at the same time (yess, I know the loudspeaker does that, but this is unobtrusive). You could have a group of people walking down the street, all listening to a song being broadcast from one person's MP3 player.
The possibilities for co-ordinated dance numbers alone, à la Grease, are immense.
That's all in secure mode, in which the headset would only accept audio from a single source. Imagine, however, what it would be like to have it in unsecure mode. A simple DSP would selectively accept the strongest signals, allowing you to listen in on all the bluetooth audio transmissions going on all the time. Not much use now, but if it caught on, there would be vast advertising possibilities - with only a thirty- foot range, a restaurant could advertise itself to anyone nearby without having to buy radio airtime. If the headsets caught on, the possibilities for localized mass media are immense. Anyone at all could reach a vast audience, essentially for free.
You could walk down the street, listening to all the snippets of data being broadcast every thirty feet. When you heard something interesting, you'd just stop for a few minutes and listen to it. You could follow people around listening to (and possibly recording - basically, audio-pickpocketing) their music. And entirely new social culture could be born out of a single IEEE standard.
This could be easily combined with the aluminum can protocol (this section), so that you could selectively accept data prefixed by the aluminum can header, telling you where all the cans are and how to recover them.-- Macwarrior, Feb 08 2004 Nice idea, although the 'unsecure' broadcast mode would inevitably be used pretty quickly for spam-- hippo, Feb 08 2024 random, halfbakery