stream music w/o owning a parcel?

Is it at all possible to stream sound from a remote server without having to use the LSL parcel sound functions? It would be cool to stream music to a portable object you carry with you.

It would. It might come, but not yet I'm afraid.

Wasn't there a recent BBC promotion that featured a radio that one's avatar could carry around that streamed a BBC channel?

No, although it might have looked like it.

The radios let you open the stream through your browser or similar and have it play that way.

The BBC radios were a "style over content" kind of thing to be honest. The blurb wasn't exactly correct. Infact, it was pretty misleading. It was the same as just going to he BBC website. It really had nothing to do with SL at all - apart from launching the browser window to do the streaming. After that, put your radio away.

PS. Incidentally, the radios looked great in the pictures, but weren't amazingly well put together once you got to look at one in SL. It struck me as fairly shoddy, as did a great deal of the building for the BBC thing (apart from the sim that had the square buildings with the fish tank and stuff, although even that had gaping holes and texture fizzle in several places, but on the surface looked really neat).

eloise, that seems like an equitable work around until/if a true streaming feature is ever implemented. Any idea what it would take to open a link to an audio source from inside SL, like for example to click on an object and have a script load the appropriate URL in your browser?

This could also be useful for directing a user to a web page by clicking on an object in the game.

The Wiki is your friend:

http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=llLoadURL