Re: [IRCA] Oh yeah? Poll on satellite radio acceptance.

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth K. Zuk:

>This is now the digital age. DXing will always have its place, especially
>with us. The rest of the world has begun a new march to a different drummer.

OK, OK, if we're going to discuss it here, I'm throwing in my two 
cents (or perhaps a bit more) - here's my Year-End Rant from 
NorthEast Radio Watch (www.fybush.com). I'd rather continue 
discussion of the topic at RTT, but I'm here, too, so....


>So it's that time again, as we don the official NERW Prognostication 
>Cap (it's sort of a faded blue, with a big red "B" on it, and a 
>little "World Series '04" insignia on the side) and do some deep 
>thinking about the changes and challenges that face the medium we all love.
>
>These are interesting and uncertain times for radio. "Nobody knows 
>anything," as the screenwriter William Goldman famously said about 
>Hollywood, and the same is true about the radio industry as it 
>confronts perhaps the biggest transitions to be hurled its way since 
>the advent of television half a century ago forced the business to 
>reinvent itself.
>
>Back then, of course, radio not only survived but thrived. It did 
>so, we'd submit, because it figured out what it was that only radio 
>could provide. Back then, that was music - lots of it, usually 
>before it could be heard anywhere else. It was super-local 
>information, in small towns and medium-sized cities where television 
>news didn't exist or was, at best, a once-nightly affair. It was the 
>sort of intimate, one-on-one communication (even if the "one" was 
>really just one of millions of listeners) that no mass medium before 
>or since has really been able to duplicate.
>
>It was a great run while it lasted. And while it's far from over, 
>few would argue that many of the functions for which radio once held 
>pride of place have been supplanted by new technologies. The days of 
>waiting through a long list of data for a particular school closing 
>or stock quote or livestock price - or even today's number one song 
>- are long gone, and in a few years most of those radio staples will 
>be as dead as the radio soap opera or live big band performance is today.
>
>While that phase of radio's existence is drawing to a close, though, 
>radio itself is far from dead. In the aftermath of Hurricane 
>Katrina, it was the "United Radio Broadcasters" simulcast, including 
>the powerful voice of New Orleans' WWL radio, that brought 
>critically important information - and companionship - to the 
>victims of that storm scattered far and wide around the country. 
>Talk radio of all flavors was a vital part of the political debate 
>in a most politicized year. Small-town stations like WLNG on Long 
>Island's East End, WHLM in Bloomsburg, PA, WKTJ in Farmington, Maine 
>and WDEV in Vermont tied their communities together just as they've 
>always done. (And, we'd hasten to note, just as they'll continue to 
>do; it's stations like these that have the least to fear from the 
>changes we'll discuss below.)
>
>Big all-newsers like WCBS and KYW and WBZ brought the headlines, the 
>scores and the traffic to commuters with an efficiency (one 
>relatively inexpensive transmitter to millions of inexpensive 
>receivers) that no WiMax or cellphone technology is likely to match 
>for many years to come. Sirius and XM brought niche formats and 
>programming to country fans in Manhattan, Tigers fans in Rochester 
>(don't laugh - we know one!), dance-music aficionados in northern 
>Maine and, soon, Howard Stern true believers everywhere.
>
>What's that, you say? Yes, we did just mention satellite radio in 
>the same breath as "terrestrial radio," and that's the point of our 
>little Rant this year: Radio is Radio, no matter how it's delivered.
>
>This is, of course, heresy in some circles. There are broadcasters 
>(and broadcasting associations) who are firmly convinced that 
>there's some magic combination of attack promos, head-in-the-sand 
>willful ignorance and HD Radio will somehow make the satellite 
>broadcasters go away.
>
>That won't happen, and it won't happen specifically because the 
>satellite broadcasters have figured out (and rather quickly, at 
>that) just what it is that they can do better than any other medium. 
>Not everyone (and probably not even 25 percent of everyone) feels 
>the need to have access to every NHL game, or to the myriad of music 
>formats on the birds, or to hear a 24-hour updated loop of 
>information about the daily whereabouts and activities of Howard 
>Stern. Aggregate each of those niche audiences, though, make 
>receivers widely available at inexpensive prices, and promote the 
>heck out of it, and suddenly those $12.95 monthly checks start 
>adding up pretty quickly.
>
>The listeners sending in those $12.95 payments each month aren't 
>doing it because there's any particular magic to "satellite" radio. 
>They're not doing it for the sound quality, at least if our road 
>tests of both systems recently are any indication. They're doing it 
>because they like radio - and because the particular sort of radio 
>they want happens to be most efficiently made available over a 
>national satellite system rather than over a local transmitter. (And 
>it bears noting that no small number of talented radio people are 
>now toiling for XM or Sirius instead of Clear Channel or CBS or 
>Cumulus, simply because their talents are, for the moment, best 
>utilized there. Would anyone argue that what Cousin Brucie or Phlash 
>Phelps or Jonathan Schwartz are doing is any less radio because it's 
>not being heard over a terrestrial transmitter?)
>
>It's entirely understandable that some broadcasters find this change 
>alarming. We genuinely feel for people like the staffer at a 
>daytime-only AM religious outlet who's upset because many of the 
>national programs his station carries are also heard on the 
>satellite providers, who can offer 24-hour programming when his 
>station has to sign off at sunset. Technological advances have never 
>been kind to the daytimers, and to the extent that they've thrived, 
>it's been by carving out ever more local niches while programming of 
>broader interest moves to signals for which it's better suited. In 
>the sixties and seventies, it was broad-appeal music programming 
>migrating to FM; now it's just about anything that's not truly local 
>moving to the national platforms the satellite providers offer. Even 
>so, we're seeing some truly remarkable prices being paid for rather 
>limited AM signals, an indication that there are still radio people 
>who believe they can put even those signals to a good use. (And 
>indeed, there are plenty of niches still left to be filled by those 
>humble stations, especially as multilingual radio continues to grow 
>in places large and small.)
>
>Into this fray comes "HD Radio," and we can't let the Rant go by 
>without a few words on this heated topic. We still have deep 
>reservations (as do, at least privately, most of the engineers we 
>know) about whether the AM system can be implemented widely and 
>after dark without causing intolerable levels of interference to 
>existing reception, and we're unconvinced, as yet, that the improved 
>audio quality it offers, impressive though it is, will be worth the 
>expense and the tradeoffs to more than a handful of broadcasters.
>
>We're more optimistic about the FM system, and whatever we think of 
>it, it's finally gaining critical mass on the transmission end. By 
>the end of 2006, it's safe to say that listeners in most medium and 
>large markets will have access to numerous HD FM signals. We're 
>cautiously heartened by the recent alliance among many of the larger 
>broadcast groups to coordinate program offerings on their HD 
>subchannels, and even more so by their promise to finally put some 
>muscle into promoting the medium and into making receivers, so far 
>painfully elusive, available in larger quantities and at lower prices.
>
>Those delays in making HD receivers available, and the lack of a 
>truly persuasive hook to get consumers to put the available 
>receivers at the top of a long list of new gadgets vying for their 
>dollars, has the potential to be the nail in the new medium's 
>coffin. (Again, there's the essential question - what is it, 
>exactly, that HD Radio can provide better than any other medium 
>that's already out there? So far, only the prospect of multicasting 
>seems to be a plausible answer.)
>
>Need it have ended up this way, though? There's a fantasy that we've 
>been kicking around for a few months now, and it goes something like 
>this - what if, back when both satellite radio and HD Radio were 
>still in the development phase, the parties involved hadn't been 
>quite so suspicious of each other?
>
>What if those millions of satellite receivers now riding around in 
>auto dashboards and home cradles had all emerged from the factory 
>with HD Radio capability built into them? What if some of that local 
>HD Radio bandwidth could have been used to send out data to insert 
>local news, traffic and ads - provided by local broadcasters, in 
>some sort of revenue-sharing agreement - into otherwise national 
>programming on the satellites? What sort of cross-promotion might 
>have resulted from the ability to insert a "tune to 1030 now for 
>more local news" message into the satellite talk programming?
>
>How much satellite bandwidth could be put to better use if there 
>were no need for the painfully-compressed "local into national" 
>traffic and weather channels on the birds? What if some of the few 
>AM stations that still truly take advantage of that band's broad 
>nighttime coverage - the WWLs and WBZs and WGNs - were able to use 
>the satellites to bring their programming to a national audience, 
>all day long, with no skywave fading or propagation vagaries? What 
>sort of competitive advantage might one or the other of the 
>competing satellite services have enjoyed, had it been able to 
>partner with sufficiently forward-looking "traditional" broadcasters 
>to promote the ability of both media to do what each does best?
>
>What if those new local HD subchannels - now with millions of 
>receivers in the field ready to receive them - were simply part of a 
>larger "advanced radio" dial, living side-by-side with the national 
>channels from the satellite and the local analog AM and FM 
>broadcasts, offering listeners not just 50 or 100 choices on the 
>dial but potentially 200 or more, some national, some local, all 
>delivered over a single receiver?
>
>And what if all the promotional firepower that's being expended to 
>sell listeners on satellite radio or terrestrial HD radio were 
>instead used simply to promote "radio," in the face of the many 
>other entertainment options competing for consumers' limited time and money?
>
>Again, our thesis: Radio is Radio, no matter how it's delivered.
>
>Listeners know it. Programmers know it. The television industry 
>figured it out years ago, and today viewers flip back and forth 
>between local stations and national networks on a single cable or 
>satellite lineup without a second thought, as witness the lack of 
>public outcry over the impending move of "Monday Night Football" 
>from ABC to ESPN.
>
>Transitions like these are never painless. Many stations never 
>really recovered from the onslaught of TV in the fifties, and many 
>of those AM stations that survived TV and thrived in radio's second 
>golden age of the fifties and sixties were themselves swept away by 
>the blossoming of FM in the seventies and eighties. The stations 
>today that offer a nonstop diet of syndicated programming or 
>automated music will face ever-tougher competition from satellite 
>radio, portable music players and, perhaps, the eventual 
>availability of widespread wireless data services.
>
>Those stations may not make it in the long run. But we firmly 
>believe that Radio itself will, on both a local and a national 
>level, and we're looking forward to another year of writing about it all.
>
>What do you think? We welcome your comments by e-mail at "rant" at 
>fybush.com, and we'll print them beginning next week. (Be sure to 
>let us know if you don't want us to use your name!)

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