The commercials are everywhere.

An iPhone and a set of thumbs appear and a voice tells viewers that there’s an application for making labels or finding an apartment or buying textbooks. And now the voices of City College can be heard through an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The School of Media Arts launched a free application last week that offers streaming radio from the college’s radio station. It allows those who download it from the application store to listen to City College radio from their iPhone or iPod Touch at anytime. It is one of more than 25,000 applications available from third-party companies through the online store.

“Clearly this is where radio, and TV for that matter, are going,” said Stephen Davega, an instructor in SoMA’s multimedia department.

Davega and Kevin Goddard and Ray Hamilton, programmers for the radio station, were part of the team that developed the application. They received technical assistance from two other members of the multimedia department, Ryan Alexander and Devin Neimen.

SoMA radio had already completed a plan to broadcast on Internet radio through iTunes, but Davega said the plan for the application came from a grant that was received about two years ago for mobile application development.

“It’s not going to be just radio, but streaming media was well,” he said. “You can’t just download everything onto your device. YouTube, for example, is just streaming media. That’s the future.”

He hinted on future developments of the application to include streaming video that users can view on smart phones or other mobile devices.

Davega says that with the radio station “we made an obvious connection to this. AOL for example developed an application that was award-winning and praised by MacWorld among others.”

Santa Barbara City College is among the first colleges to have such technology, beaten only by , which also recently launched an application with assistance from National Public Radio.

City College’s radio content will come from the MAT 183 class, Radio Production, taught by radio host The current plan is for content to be uploaded about every two weeks according to Davega.

Even without significant promotion, the SoMA radio application has been downloaded more than 1,000 times. But Davega is more impressed by where the downloads are coming from.

“What’s amazing is that we’ve had a number of international downloads, including 80 from China,” he said.

An email was sent to all City College students with a link to SoMA’s radio website, reminding them where the radio station could be heard, either streaming at SoMA radio’s website or on iTunes radio.

Davega says Hamilton plans to be at the opening of Santa Barbara’s Apple Store later this year promoting SoMA radio.

City College’s computer science department is also expected to offer a class on the iPhone Software Developer’s kit in the fall, which would instruct students on how to create applications of their own.