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March 16, 2005
Australian commercial radio rant
Many of you know that my only sibling is a prominent Australian commercial radio host and he's presently heavily involved in experimental broadcasting technologies and information service provision. Therefore, I should be up front in saying I have not discussed what I am about to say with my brother, and am quite happy to have him contest me on this issue at any future point.
That said, I believe the Australian commercial radio lobby is probably acting in the interests of its members, but their demands today for free spectrum space and a moratorium on new commercial players are absolutely outrageous. These calls for what amounts to be a oligarchical industry structure as 'payment' for investment in digital radio broadcasting are anti-competitive, short-sighted and absolutely absurd.
The thing is, we've been through this before. When digital television was first discussed in Australia, we had the opportunity to have multi-channelling and datacasting in addition to the high-definition television. Multichannelling and datacasting only needed a set top box, and possibly an ADSL back channel, but HDTV needed a brand new, very expensive television in order to be able to receive the signal. But the commercial television and subscription television lobbies fought the government, saying that multichannelling would be anti-competitive for the immature subscription television industry, and datacasting shouldn't be allowed to develop as a kind of "back door" or de facto method of broadcasting. New players in commercial television were banned until 2006, and we lost any chance of developing a competitive digital telvision environment based on diversity. Dozens of commentators have blasted Australian digital television policy development as a travesty of future planning, and regarded it as monumentally contrary to the dominant communications industry policy of competition, choice and diversity.
And now the Australian commercial radio lobby wants to do the same thing to radio broadcasting? You have got to be kidding me?
Posted by jj at March 16, 2005 3:35 PM
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Let them try I say.
Fortunately the 'radio' horse has already bolted!
Innovation will always find a way around regulation where there is customer demand.
The commercial radio lobby and federal government are naive in the extreme if they think that spectrum license rationing and the ability to be 'first' to market are going to give them some competitive advantage.
They are stuck in a pre-IP time warp which limits their thinking to a large antenna on top of a hill pumping out megawatts of commercial filled music as the definition of radio broadcasting - analogue or digital! Do they think we're sitting at home with a crystal set?
As your sibling highlighted in his most recent Blog - every mobile phone tower in the country can broadcast at least AM quality radio - and every mobile phone is a potential radio receiver. It's ironic that it's taken the original creator of Pirate Radio in the UK - Richard Branson to launch an IP based radio service delivered to mobile phone handsets.
For those who prefer FM+ quality, a few hundred bucks will purchase a streaming audio unit for you stereo cabinet that will either plug into your broadband - being cable, ADSL, Wi-Fi ... and deliver access to over 1000+ streaming radio stations on the internet (my personal favourite www.radioio70s.com). No PC required.
Of course for maximum coverage satellite digital radio is an alternative - today in the US you can choose from XM Radio's 136 stations for AUD$12.65/month or Sirius's 121 channels $17 per month, and you can buy stereo, handheld and car units for little more than a standard radio(Wired Magazine p 101). Not available in Australia yet - but if you think we could find around 200,000 subscribers, you could build a business plan to raise the AUD$210 million required to put a Boeing 702 satellite into geostationary orbit and deliver 100+ radio stations down under.
So whether it's via ADSL, Cable, Wi-Fi, GPRS, CDMA, iBurst or even analogue dial-up, digital radio infrastructure is here and ready to roll. Alan Jones and Amanda Keller can dance with Helen Coonan as much as they like.
TV will be next - it's only a matter of bandwidth.
Regards
Hamish
Reference: Wired Magazine (www.wired.com) March 2005 - Cover Story "The End of Radio (As we know it)"
Posted by: H ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.joannejacobs.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 16, 2005 11:24 PM
Absolutely agree with both your original post Joanne, as well as Hamish's comment - the horse has not only bolted on digital radio, it's out of the farm altogether and is heading straight for the glue factory!
I wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age almost a decade ago about the imminent arrival of digital radio. Today in 2005, we still haven't even decided on Eureka 147 DAB as the final standard, and that's over 50 months after DVB television started transmission!
No matter what cosy deal the licence holders do with the government, digital radio is a dead duck. Improvement in sound quality over FM is negligible, in-building mobile reception is problematic and much of the older core radio listeners are still happy with AM - a 1920s technology.
Transmitters are dead. Servers and wireless IP are the future of digital audio. Have a look at my latest blog entry for another audio programming distribution model.
Posted by: Brother G at March 17, 2005 9:05 AM
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