One Sunday last fall I listened to radio coverage of a touchdown drive by the New York Giants from my hotel room in Valencia, Spain. Like many of you, I had found that I could access far-flung radio stations through iTunes.

Tivoli, the maker of pleasingly simple design-conscious radios, yesterday released a radio that can pull thousands of stations from the Internet, bypassing the old-fangled airwaves. The idea, of course, is to make Internet radio as easy to use as any conventional compact radio.

The NetWorks radio connects to the web using Wi-Fi or Ethernet and searches for stations by country, genre or call letters. Like virtually every electronics manufacturer, Tivoli claims their radio can be used right out of the box. In their case, it appears to be the case. At a product demonstration today, they unwrapped a new one, and within a minute flat it was filling a ballroom in the Helmsley Palace Hotel with music from an obscure radio station on Martha’s Vineyard.

The radio should be available in the fall. No word yet on price.