[M] BBC Russia aims to expand but faces challenges
 

From the «like not getting thrown in jail» department:
Title: BBC Russia wants to expand, but faces challenges
Author:
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2015 07:12:32 -0400
Link: http://pipedot.org/story/2015-09-30/...ces-challenges

In July, the BBC announced proposals to “invest” in BBC World Service. This
includes a desire for a "bigger digital presence" in Russian through a new
digital service. But BBC satellite TV for Russia is problematic. Very few
Russians have rotatable satellite dishes. About 25% of Russian homes have fixed
Ku-band satellite dishes to receive direct-to-home services such as TricolorTV
and NTV+. Western news channels are not included and are legally not welcome[1]
..

So far, Russia has not blocked the Internet content of Western international
broadcasters, at least not on a continuous basis. Recent press accounts
indicate that Russian authorities may even try to ban anonymizers and other
methods used to work around online censorship. Circumvention would become more
difficult. In an extreme scenario, Russia could physically cut off the
landlines of Internet traffic into the country. Then no circumvention would be
possible.

This could bring BBC Russia back to the venerable but unfashionable medium of
shortwave radio. Shortwave is no longer used for domestic broadcasting in
Russia and BBC Russian eliminated its shortwave broadcasts in 2011. But, if
need be, Russians could dust off their Cold War era shortwave radios or
purchase inexpensive Chinese-made portable radios. In addition to voice
broadcasts, text, images, and even formatted web pages can be broadcast and
received by any shortwave radio connected to a PC or mobile device running
appropriate software. This has been demonstrated in VOA Radiogram experiments[2]
..

If Russia blocks Internet content from abroad, it may try to jam shortwave
radio content from abroad, too, but most jamming transmitters of the Cold War
era have been dismantled or have fallen into disrepair. Many of the jamming
transmitters are outside of Russia, in former Soviet republics. Reviving a
shortwave jamming apparatus would be a much more expensive proposition than
blocking Internet content. Various Cold War anti-jamming tactics, using various
tricks of ionospheric propagation, can be employed. Text via shortwave would be
even more resistant to jamming than voice broadcasts.

Links:
[1]: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/b...ts-not-so-easy (link)
[2]: http://voaradiogram.net/ (link)


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