Digital Radio
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Does AOL Radio Mean The End Of FM Stations?
AOL Radio, Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm are some of the online radio services which have become popular these last few years. A lot of of these are also available on mobile devices such as mobile phones. Does this indicate the end of conventional radio stations? I will take a look at the impact of streaming radio on the radio landscape.
Local radio stations do seem to have a hard time as of late. Satellite radio has been cutting the market share of conventional radio stations severely in the past couple of years by providing mobility, a large number of commercial-free music channels as well as news and entertainment channels. The internet has enabled access to a virtually unlimited number of online radio channels.
Pandora along with other online radio providers have become available on wireless audio transmitter and portable devices by installing the suitable app. This raises convenience and mobility of online radio. Mobility has thus far been the biggest advantage of local radio.
AOL Radio which features 200 plus music channels of 25 genres uses CBS radio as its underlying platform. It also offers access to 150 national CBS radio stations. The underlying CBS radio platform "play.it" also permits listeners to make their own customized music channels. This is done by entering the names of albums, tracks or artists. The tracks played on each music channels can also be stored on an iPod for later playback by using 3-rd party tool iGetMusic.
Other online music services have followed suit and are providing similar customized music. Pandora and Last.fm allow listeners to enter the name of an artist and then play music by randomly choosing titles by these artist along with other titles which are similar in genre or character. However, most online radio broadcasters lack the ability to create fully customized radio stations such as the “play.it” platform.
Is the extinction of local radio close? The growth of competition from satellite and online radio has started to take away listeners from local radio stations. Conventional radio appears to have a hard time to halt this trend. Online radio is especially useful for niche broadcasters who have been unable to broadcast due to the high price and licensing of frequency space.
The large number of accessible stations is a big plus for online radio listeners. Still, this is a problem for online broadcasters. This big number of stations is diluting the number of listeners. Consequently streaming radio broadcasters have found it difficult to be profitable. At the same time, however, there is less pressure to insert commercials because of the lower expenses of broadcasting compared with conventional stations. This has made online radio content more interesting than terrestrial radio.
Local programming such as news and local events, on the other hand, will remain one of the big advantages of local radio. Furthermore, local radio is now improving the audio quality by using digital broadcast technologies versus traditional FM broadcasts which has been a big benefit of online radio up to now. The big factors that will ultimately determine the fate of each technology are content and convenience. Online radio and traditional radio each have their own niche in regard to providing unique content and both offer high mobility and convenience so there will almost certainly be no clear winner.
Digital Radio will be launched on 1st July in Australia?
Have you bought a new digital radio yet or will you wait for awhile.
What do you know about digital radio, how will it work and do you think it will be better than analogue radio.
I 'd like to hear your thoughts.
Digital radio operates in the L-Band or Band III depending on what your country chooses to use. Some use one or the other exclusively and some countries mix and match on both bands. The quality of the sound will be equal to or better than FM....far superior to AM....as for the program content, you will have a lot more choices, but the actual quality of content will depend on what the broadcasters do....if it's garbage in, it will just be better quality garbage out....DAB has still not taken off in Canada because of technical limitations and receivers are horrifically expensive...
Digital Radio Scan - Melbourne, Australia (Sangean DPR-69 DAB+)
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