The thing a lot of people seem to miss about radio, especially given
the hobby we all love and the inclinations it fosters, is that radio
is a delivery medium and definitely not the message (although for
many of us it actually is.) I hate to say it but we'd be somewhat
analogous to people who'd enjoy the clicks and scratches on vinyl as
much as, if not more than, the tune they're listening to.
Radio is FM is AM is SW is LW is WiFi is satellite is whatever. All
are just means of getting programming to a given point or points.
For in home use in the western world, chances are that in ten to
twenty years the only radio waves around will be your local router
talking to various devices. Why bother with old school broadcasting,
all that hardware, all that FCC garbage when all you have to do to
sell advertising is generate compelling programming and get it out on the 'net?
Mobile radio will be replaced by mobile 'net (provided the bandwidth
is there.) You can get everything you can hear on the radio plus just
about anything else there is to be heard too. Again, it's not the
delivery system that matters to Joe Public and an old medium *will*
be replaced by a newer one that better meets the user's needs.
So long as bandwidth is functionally infinite and available (and
we're working hard on that while pretending that rural areas don't
exist) then the old school broadcasters will become less and less
relevant. People loved their typewriters too but the PC killed that
once thriving industry as well. The 'net is going to do the same to
the old transmission media.
TV, radio, cinema, the various broadcasting media, all the support
systems for them are just a short time away from hitting the event
horizon of that singularity we call the Internet. What happens after
that none of us can tell but I think it's a safe bet that all the
markets will be smashed into many, many fragments and if you want to
compete for a place in any of those pieces you had better come up
with something worth watching or listening to.
And you never know, all kinds of fascinating stuff might evolve out
of this that even the most hardcore SWL would hugely enjoy...
Lee
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