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Re: Monday, May 10, 2004
Doc, Sorry for the slow reply.... I agree, Internet broadcasting may be an answer (but not the only answer IMHO.) There certrainly are a lot of Internet broadcasters out there, and many of them deliver fairly high quality audio and programming. About the only hitch is that it takes a decent DSL or CATV data line to bring it into your home. I have listened to several of the Internet broadcasters (but not recently -- and that's another story) and I think there is a future for them. KPIG is but one example. They are not in a good geographical location (how many people know where Freedom CA is anyway?), and most people just cannot receive their FM signal anyway, but this is where the 'net provides a way around their geographical reception problems. As for NPR, I think there are enough NPR affiliates webcasting that probably all of the NPR lineup is available somewhere, and many webcasters now have archives available of their past programming (often made readily available for downloading for a week or more) so catching a program from a series when one happens to miss an episode for some reason is now pretty easy to do. As CATV makes fibre to the curb more common, and with the telcos responding with higher speed DSL lines, I think webcasting will soon take off. The biggest problems I think will come from the economics of webcasting, and that is where advertising comes in. How can a webcaster sell time when they are using UDP and do not know how many listeners there are, or where they are? What model of financing a 24/7 webcast works? Google style visual subtleties like their pastel colored "sponsored link" messages probably will not work in an audio only format, yet I much prefer Google's ads (tasteful and often quite relevant to what I am looking for) to those nasty pop-ups and pop-unders that so many other web sites use. Or, of course, you could use a subscription model to offset the operating costs and encrypt the UDP stream so only members can listen. Or, you could just beg for support periodically, like Pacifica and the NPR stations do. That's the nice part of being in the early stages of something, the innovators get to try out new ideas because no one "knows" yet what works and what doesn't.
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