It's
a familiar scenario: A communications medium is under assault by a raft
of new technology choices and finds itself scrambling to expand, keep
up, and hold on to its dwindling audience. I'm not talking about movies
or broadcast (or even cable) television. Instead, this tale is being
played out in the terrestrial radio industry.
The
attack is arriving in the form of satellite radio and its portable
receivers, online niche and genre "broadcasts" from music services
(MSN, Real, Launch), and even homegrown podcasts. Now the radio
industry is preparing its counterattack, and it's twofold: One part is
forward-leaning, the other completely retro. The forward-leaning part
is the growing availability of podcasts from commercial and nonprofit
radio stations. The latter have made the best use of these
time-shifting portable audio packages. NPR, for example, offers most of
its popular programs as podcasts. It's a great way to let your audience
listen when and where they want. But, as far as I can tell, podcasts
are of little use to commercial, news, and Top 40 music stations. For
them, the retro approach is taking hold. Station after station is
reintroducing Internet radio. Perhaps you remember the first
Internet-radio boom.
In the early days of the Internet, radio stations were among the
first media outlets to try putting their content on the Web. Station
after station around the country added a little link to its rather
amateurish Web sites, offering live, streaming audio of their
broadcasts. The quality was, as I recall, always a bit subpar
(bandwidth issues resulted in warbling even in songs where the notes
were crystal clear), but it was passable and an excellent way around
jury-rigging antennas to work in high-rise buildings. It was especially
welcome for sports and news radio fans who could not listen to AM radio
on the 11th floor of a midtown Manhattan office but could get an
Internet radio feed for, say, the broadcast of a favorite baseball
team's game. (Go Mets!) There was also the benefit of being able to
listen to your local radio station whether you were in town or on the
other side of the globe.
It was not particularly well organized, but businesses did start
springing up to help manage and access the growing number of feeds—and
improve their overall quality. Mark Cuban, now owner of the Dallas
Mavericks basketball team, built his fortune by launching Audionet
(which later become Broadcast.com) in the mid-nineties. He then sold it
to Yahoo! for billions. Still, by the time he sold it, there were
already signs that the party was over. My favorite stations started
pulling their streaming audio links.—Continue Reading
