Re: Vikings upset Karmazin

[umar@nerodia.wcrb.com]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2000, Martin J. Waters wrote:

>         First of all, Mel is going to have to get over it. Even he's not
> big enough to stop internet radio.

He's not trying to stop it; he's choosing not to participate. If his goal
is to make money in radio, I think he's making the correct choice.
 
>         Never is a very long time. The problems with listening to internet
> radio broadcasts that you identify will be taken care of. Even now, they're
> not all that bad.

You can't rely on an Internet stream being there when you want it. As
available bandwidth increases, so will the demands of consumers, and the
Internet of the future is likely to be just as congested as it is today.

> As to portability, a lot of people leave a radio on all
> day at home or leave a radio on where they work. They can do  (and already
> do) the same thing with the computer, and it gives / will give them the
> choice of a lot more stations (unless they want to listen to Mel's
> stations!) and in many cases better signals. Eventually, Arbitron will
> start measuring it. As another post said, it's like putting an FM station
> on the air in 1946.

Actually, it's more like setting up a shortwave station.

>         We're already just about to have miniaturized, hand-held, wireless
> internet/e-mail devices proliferate. All those Buck Rogers and Star Trek
> devices are about to be on sale at Radio Shack. There's no reason that a
> little farther down the road one of those devices can't be playing your
> favorite radio station over the internet at the same time.

There's a very good reason: lack of available spectrum. How far would an
AM or FM radio station get if it had to transmit a separate signal over
the air for each listener? Now, if you want to push into the 100 GHz range
and put repeaters on every telephone pole, maybe it can be done. But
somebody's going to have to pay a great deal to create and maintain that
infrastructure, and I don't see it happening soon. How well can it compete
with free, over-the-air radio?

> What goes around comes around. It'll be back to those palm-sized
> transistor radios all us kids had circa 1962, except they'll have a
> computer screen on them. I can see wireless phone, internet/email access
> and radio reception all in one unit.

And the radio it'll get will still be AM and FM. I doubt there'll ever be
enough demand for streaming audio to justify wasting Internet bandwidth on
it.  It'll always be more efficient to broadcast audio over the air,
whether locally or via satellite, then to stream it over the Internet.

As much as I don't particularly care for Mel or his works, I think he's
quite right in this case.


Rob Landry
umar@nerodia.wcrb.com