FM Decision
Good old FM has been knocking around since the 40’s and RTE have been broadcasting on it since the 60’s, However it didn’t become popular in Ireland for another 20 years.
That’s when, in 1981, an entrepreneur called Chris Carey made a decision to base pirate station Radio Nova firmly on FM. He sold the advantages of “clutter free” stereo FM and it was a huge success. So much so that in 1988 the government, when establishing the new legal independent radio sector, made a very big decision to go FM only. Such was the impact of this decision that RTE pre-emtively re-branded its pop music station from Radio 2 to 2FM.
In just seven years Irelands radio industry moved from AM to FM.
Now we are well into the new millennium with a new medium capable of advancing radio as much as FM did all those years ago. Question is: who will have the balls to make the big decision?
The move from FM broadcasting to online broadcasting might now be as linear and smooth as it was from AM to FM. For a start there are a multitude of different audio formats, Real, WMA, MP3, OGG etc.. This will inevitably confuse people who are not technically minded. You also have a variety of different receiving platforms ranging from modern mobile phones to laptops to full out Wi-Fi Radios. Not to mention that this only deals with live transmission and not audio on demand programming.
The choice over who dominates a national live audio platform will be decided by people who want a system that has an integrated EPG, controlled and edited by themselves online. The EPG is fed to their receiving device, a Wi-Fi Radio or laptop or phone, coupled with an audio stream using a single popular codec, i.e. MP3.
Of course, this would require significant bandwidth costs on the part of the supplier and a solution to transcode multiple simultaneous radio streams to MP3. The costs of such a platform could only be offset by charging subscribers.
Could the move from FM to Online Broadcasting herald the end of free over the air radio?
I agree with Jim that online radio will be a big part of the future.
Making your own EPG, the sheer variety of content available, and much of it on-demand, is all great. However as Jim pointed out the clatter of various formats and signifcant bandwidth costs make it confusing and expensive.
DAB broadcasting is much cheaper than FM or the internet. In addition, from a listeners point-of-view it’s simple. Plug in the box, turn it on, done.
I feel DAB will be the platform for mass market broad-casting and the internet will be great for niche and/or on-demand narrow-casting.
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