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Has radio blown the future?

By Jock Given - posted Friday, 29 February 2008


There’ll be No Hiss and Crackle, but for many Australians, there’ll be no signal at all. Even in the areas covered by the initial launch, there are big questions about the consistency of signal coverage. There’ll be no satellite digital radio service, at least initially, although WorldSpace, which already runs a global satellite radio business with about 180,000 subscribers and uplinks to its Asian satellites from Melbourne, is “in active discussion with local partners”, according to the Vice President - Regulatory and Operations at its AsiaSpace subsidiary, Les Davey.

The six-year moratorium on new commercial competitors applies only to terrestrially-delivered services. Davey hopes it may be possible to use software upgrades to adapt receivers to handle different radio broadcasting technologies, although this will not be possible if the receivers do not already have suitable tuners designed for the frequency bands used by additional services, or are designed for a single technology only.

Spoilt for Choice? Hardly. The ABC has dig Radio, dig Jazz and dig Country already available online and via digital TV, able to be flicked on for terrestrial digital radio audiences. A lot of material created for Radio Australia only gets to Australian audiences via the Internet. But most new services from the national, commercial and community sectors are going to cost money. The cash for this content will need to be found on top of the tens of millions of dollars already being found for the infrastructure to get digital radio just to the state capitals. And the capacity available from Channel 9A won’t even accommodate all the existing city-wide community stations, much less the 100+ channels that satellite subscribers in North America have signed up to at loss-leading prices.

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Tuning Without Numbers? Some FM stations already transmit this information if you have a receiver that can read it.

Staying Tuned to national networks? That’s an issue for the ABC and the SBS, but not for the commercial and community stations.

Read All About It? While you are driving? Showering?

Rewind and record? It’s called an iPod or an MP3 player.

Radio’s question is not whether the future will be digital. The present already is. Nor is it, apocalyptically, whether radio will survive. It will probably thrive, though as always, it will change. The question is a pretty mundane one: how much will a particular kind of digital radio future cost and will listeners who already inhabit a digital audio world think the benefits are worth it?

The delays about digital radio in Australia over the last decade have been entirely understandable. The business case has been highly speculative; the overseas experience intriguing but largely catastrophic. The price of that delay, however, is that a big part of the audio future has been built by people other than radio broadcasters. The danger for radio now is that audiences will judge the digital services launched next year not excitedly, against the standards of AM and FM services they are meant to enhance, but, quizzically, against the standards already established by online and portable digital audio.

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A longer version of this article first appeared on Creative Economy.



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About the Author

Jock Given is the author of Turning off the Television: Broadcasting’s Uncertain Future and America’s Pie: Trade and Culture after 9/11 and Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research. He was previously Director of the Communications Law Centre, Policy Advisor at the Australian Film Commission and Director Legislation and Industry Economics at the Department of Transport and Communications. In 2003–04, he received the C.H. Currey Fellowship at the State Library of NSW for a project about early wireless entrepreneur Ernest Fisk.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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