October 6, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:If it curses, fine it
Jeff Jarvis hails the impending death of terrestrial radio with Howard Stern's move to Sirius.
There, ladies and gentlemen, is the last nail in the coffin of broadcast as the central medium in America. And the FCC hammered it in.The age of one-size-fits-all media is over but the FCC and Congress don't want to admit it and so they are not allowing TV and radio to compete with the tremendous choice and freedom now available on cable, satellite, and the internet -- and soon via ubiquitous broadband and podcasting and all that. I'll say it again: Just tear down the antennas; we don't need them anymore.
Don't tear them down just yet. Radio has been taxed and regulated, expect more subsidies when it stops moving altogether.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at October 6, 2004 11:42 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksHaha
You're going to get the American Version of the Instituinally Socialist BBC!
Put subsidies in Room 101 now!
This is a lot more complicated than the establishment of a subsidized BBC-type national broadcaster, one that we'll never adopt in the US. I like the BBC, but don't know if I'd want to be forced to pay for it.
But it's important to know where our broadcast "subsidies" go; government doesn't just hand out money, but favors and rights and privileges. These last three have, of late, gone toward broadcast corporations that are unwilling to take risks.
So before we worry about some sort of American BBC, we should look to the companies that are granted overwhelming commercial broadcast advantages -- call 'em what you want, they're subsidies -- and then use them to force-feed us the three holy formats of Nelly, Shania Twain and Nickelback.
I just want to make sure we don't drag US public radio into this thread of subsidy-bashing, because compared with the BBC, Viacom and Clear Channel, public radio programming is a model of free-market efficiency.
This I say fully and intimately aware of the faults of the public radio's financial model.
I feel that public radio would improve if they smashed Clear Channel and allowed for more localism such as local organizations and non-profits being able to run low watt stations. This may actually open up radio for the little people. Not just big organizations. Maybe it will become a more creative medium if the scum sucking corporations feel they can no longer make a buck there or that it's not worth it anymore because the returns are so low.
This is being blown incredibly out of proportion. Stern is going to a subscription service for the same reason The Sopranos runs on a subscription service. So they can have the content they want without concern for offending those who aren't paying customers. Works for me. I can't say I'll miss Stern in the slightest. those owho care can pay direct instead of enduring obnoxious ads. Everybody wins.
I think Jeff Jarvis is a little eager in his desire to do away with terrestrial broadcast (his post makes it clear that longer-term, he thinks they'll be unnecessary), among other things he seems to forget the advent of digital AM -- it is now possible to send out a crystal-clear digital broadcast concurrently with a traditional (and low-quality) analog AM signal. No subscription requird, you just need a receiver capable of capturing and decoding the digital sideband signal.
I agree with 'lindenen' on the issues surrounding Clear Channel. Breaking them up and re-opening the market to broader competition would be a huge step in the right direction.
Breaking up Clear Channel is massive overkill. Sell the spectrum, let the small operators run low-power stations to cover small areas and let everyone buy and sell spectrum, establish market prices for pieces of it, and use all of it for once, and you'll see a lot more variety.
Or just leave things as they are and wait for new technology to route around the obstructions imposed by the decades-old nationalization of the broadcast spectrum, which seems to be the solution we're going with.
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