RE: FCC gives ultimatum to Radio Free Brattleboro

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 01:50 PM 9/7/2003, A. Joseph Ross wrote:
>On 6 Sep 2003 at 7:53, Doug Bassett wrote:
>
> > that.  A world without rules fast becomes chaos,
> > and chaos is fun only for a little while.  Let's not
> > turn the FM band into another citizens band please.
>
>What I really wish they'd do is create a citizens broadcast band, where 
>people could set up
>stations and broadcast to their heart's content to whoever wants to listen.
>--
>A. Joseph Ross, J.D.

Have you ever listened to the CB?  It's a total mess.  I used to have a CB 
radio in my car when in high school & home for the summers in college (I 
drove a lot then...my girlfriend at the time lived 45 minutes north of my 
home on I-395) and it was always a total jumble of people stomping all over 
other people's converstations.

For that matter, you could say the internet already is a CB of sorts.  You 
had thousands of little webcast stations that all had practically zero 
audience despite their insistence that they had such awesome 
content.  Yeah, right.

The power of radio and TV is precisely that the effective choice of 
programming people want to hear/see is very limited, and very easy to get 
at.   If you create a band that will be home to dozens of useless little 
stations with 1 mile broadcast diameters, you've accomplished nothing; 
nobody will listen to it.  Look at Allston-Brighton Free Radio...despite a 
decent little AM signal, nobody listens because the content isn't really 
all that great or different.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA