iPhone Future?
With the advent of the iPhone, Nokia internet radio and dedicated internet wi-fi radios, people keep telling me the internet is the future.Though I firmly believe the internet is a key part of the future, it will never replace broadcast radio for two key reasons.
The most important is establishing standards. As we speak there is no standard streaming method for online radio. It’s all a mix of mp3, ogg, aac, wma and so on. Worse, not everything will work on every computer, wi-fi radio or phone. The situation deteriorates when you try to list your station on a device with each manafacturer having it’s own seperate listing service.
The second reason is bandwidth. There just isn’t enough to handle broadcast size audiences. For example, 98 or 104 in Dublin would have 25,000 people listening at any given time. The infrastructure is not there to handle that kind of number. Worse, at an average 50 cent per listener per month, it would cost the station €150k a year to be “on air”. That is way over what it costs to run an FM or DAB transmitter.
In the States with bandwidth and iPhones a plenty, they’re running into serious problems with just regular daily use, never mind radio streaming. Read this article in the New York Times for more.
The internet is not the saviour of radio but it will play a key part. My vision of the future is that DAB will become the new FM, our current FM will become the new AM and the internet will be the LW or SW of the future.
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