A few years ago, in an article called “Taking Control Of The Infinite Dial,” I encouraged broadcasters to be pro-active in securing radio’s place in the dashboard of the future. At that moment, it looked like automakers were gearing up to offer their own streaming music channels. It seemed entirely possible that radio’s thousands of individual station streams had a chance of being overlooked—both by the auto industry and by other aggregators who saw a mainstream FM stream as being, if anything, less interesting than a hobbyist’s streaming station.

Since then, the landscape has changed in several ways. Automakers are now more interested in bringing Pandora to your dashboard than providing “Chrysler’s Drive-FM” or something of that sort. Clear Channel has been appropriately aggressive in making deals with other broadcasters, most recently today’s deal that puts the Cumulus stations on its iHeartRadio platform. And several broadcasters recently have taken a harder line in letting outside radio stream aggregators include their station streams; (Clear Channel had already effectively precluded anything other than linking to its own player).

The logic of the Clear Channel/Cumulus deal is made even clearer by the just-released Triton Digital Media streaming stats for October. The increased activity around iHeart Radio—September’s iHeart Music Festival and the recent addition of personalized streams—helped Clear Channel open up a lead on CBS, which saw AOL Radio move from its Radio.com platform to Slacker that month. (Slacker showed gains comparable to what CBS lost.) And it would take their own deals with 3-4 of the remaining larger broadcasters to create that sort of critical mass for CBS.

All that said, station aggregation is not curation. The other challenge from the 2008 article, finding a good way to help listeners negotiating an infinite number of radio choices figure out which of a hundred “Kiss-FMs” or two-dozen “Jack FMs” they might like best, is still largely unaddressed. On an AM/FM radio that offers 40 choices, listeners are still unlikely to find more than five or six regular stops, or even to significantly alter those choices without the sort of marketing that rarely exists now. With the Cumulus deal, the challenge of brand building that yesterday faced 800 stations is now shared by 1,370 stations, not counting Clear Channel’s other deals.

Major broadcasters still need to better stare down the challenge of using their expanding national platforms to create unique national content. Some of the channels with which CBS Radio has replaced its AOL Radio content are a step in the right direction. So are some of the innovative offerings from Radio One’s recently unveiled suite of Web-only stations. But the potential of national radio is still largely untapped, and national stations are usually an un-hosted, inchoate afterthought.

Clear Channel’s Bob Pittman may be right that WHTZ (Z100) New York and KIIS Los Angeles have become CC’s national CHRs to Internet (and satellite) radio users, but there are a lot of formats without the regular availability of CHR in most markets. Now that existing broadcasters are closer to having the delivery system, there’s no reason not to start fielding better services for listeners whose tastes are only lucrative enough to satisfy on a national basis.

Finally, although I applaud broadcasters for not turning over the job of curating radio entirely to stream aggregators, I’m still in favor of station streams being available in as many places as possible. Recently, at least two groups have become more restrictive with at least one major stream aggregator, resulting in certain streams being pulled from tabletop Internet radios, for instance.

While I can’t speak to the individual relationships involved in those particular decisions, I’m still in favor of stations making their streams as ubiquitous as possible. (My own preference as a user is still bookmarking streams to my own media player, something many groups have tried to make difficult for a while.) Even after the Cumulus/Clear Channel deal, we’re still not close to having every radio station on one broadcaster’s platform, and I wouldn’t begrudge that convenience to any consumer who really wants it.

Disclosure: My other employer Edison Research works with Pandora and with several of the groups mentioned here.