"Peter Maus" wrote in message
...
[snip]
Karmazin said that the real benefit of digital broadcasting,
whether DAB, or IBOC, because of the interactive potential of
digital distribution, as currently demonstrated with digital cable,
will be the capture of the holy grail of broadcasting since the
media were first blown into the air--absolutely accurate counts of
who's listening, and when.
I can imagine how they might get a sense of which radios are tuned to
which program. But how can they know who, if anyone, is listening?
It will also mean the ultimate in usage sensitive pricing....
Subscription radio.
When asked if this was his goal, he said not at first. But
eventually, yes.
There followed a lot of mumbling in the room.
Now, whether IBOC, especially on AM, proves itself as a
practicality before something else comes along to obsolete it will
be determined in the next few years. XM growth, and expansion of
accessibility, demonstrates it to be a viable contender on the
horizon. And the availability of internet radio through cell phones
and PDA's is proving to be a surprise, although certainly not a
current threat. In the meantime, the larger broadcasters retain
their investment, their profitability, and their competitive
advantages of both scale and strategy over smaller operators. While
preparing to take full advantage of all the media at their disposal.
Of course, free radio has a competitive advantage over pay radio. It
would be up to the networks to somehow come up with programming people
will pay for. Anyway, pay programming now seems to be low cost. No
multimilllion talk show hosts and such.
Something that smaller operators will have to struggle to achieve.
But the ultimate losers with IBOC will not be the smaller
operators.
The ultimate loss will be on our side of the grille cloth.
It might, but the loss would depend on the number of people willing to
pay for radio. There's a hard core who won't pay for cable, and I'd
guess the hard core who won't pay for radio is even larger.
Frank Dresser
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