Radio under siege Satellite services and podcasters are among the competitors luring listeners away from the FM and AM dials May 1, 2005|By Christopher Boyd, Sentinel Staff Writer Radios nearly century-long run as a closed-door club for insiders with broadcast licenses is coming to an end as digital technology opens the door to homegrown disc jockeys with broadband connections. The challenge is in its infancy, but the industry is preparing for ever expanding competition. Its coming from many directions, including satellite radio, cable television, wireless phone companies and Internet radio services. Each year, it seems, new alternatives to traditional radio arrive. One of the most recent, called podcasting, has already attracted about 3,000 entrepreneurs who produce programming for downloading onto wildly popular iPod digital music players. In response, Infinity Broadcasting Co., one of the nations largest terrestrial radio groups, last week announced that it would convert an underperforming AM talk radio station in San Francisco to an all-podcast format. Podcasts are essentially audio files that people make on their own and upload to Internet sites like iPodder.net. From there, the files can be downloaded and stored on digital devices for playing. The technology allows anyone with a computer to create what amounts to a homemade radio show. Infinity calls the new programming an experiment, and the company hasnt said how long it would try it before deciding whether to keep it. The station wont pay or charge for the podcasts, which will be submitted by listeners and screened to assure the content is suitable for the airwaves. To be sure, terrestrial radio remains highly profitable. But the companies that dominate the medium worry about any alternative that steals listeners. Among their rivals are a pair of satellite radio broadcasters, XM and Sirius Satellite Radio, which are gaining thousands of subscribers each month for their pay-to-listen services. Sirius, the smaller of the two, has signed celebrated shock jock Howard Stern and home-decor diva Martha Stewart to do shows with the potential to lure still greater numbers of subscribers. But radio industry experts say the real challenge to terrestrial broadcasters will come from online programmers who will use quickly evolving wireless broadband services to move content to listeners. That competition has arrived and is beginning to capture an audience. Peter Simons, a Jacksonville Web site developer, subscribes to two online services and says that ever faster broadband connection speeds are vastly improving the audio quality of online music. Internet radio opens you up to all kinds of music that you never heard before, the 37-year-old Simons said. It isnt nearly as commercial as regular radio, so you can pick the style of music you want to hear and youre not forced to listen to the same artists over and over. And Simons said he likes the interactive features of Internet radio that allow listeners to learn more about featured musicians and then buy their songs online. As improvements keep coming, and wireless broadband becomes more widely available, industry analysts say broadbands audience will grow. Everything is heading to the same place, which is broadband, said Robert Unmacht, a media consultant with IN3 Partners Inc. in Nashville, Tenn. Ultimately, wireless broadband will be the future of the industry. It just will take awhile. Though conventional radio remains huge compared to the alternative media, the industry has reason for concern. Improvements in technology now allow cell phones to play streaming audio and car receivers to tap into ground-based wireless broadband transmissions. Start-up businesses leading the charge are cocky about their ability to unseat, or at least greatly humble, the grandfather of all broadcasting media. I think radio broadcasters are in serious trouble, said Mike Roe, founder of Radioio, a Jacksonville Int
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:03:35 +0000
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