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"You just can't get a good quality radio stream on a 56k modem at the end of the day. I've had it myself - it buffers or breaks up or sounds really rubbish and just turns people off.," so says Alex Stanley of Bristol Music Project. Selecta's DJ Demon D appears to agree: "I certainly think that the lack of uptake or availability of broadband is the biggest single limiting factor with Internet radio." Broadband uptake has just hit 2 million in the UK, which for a time seemed to be lagging behind the rest of Europe. In the USA, the number of Internet users with broadband in their homes has more than doubled in the last two years to about 18%. Assuming this trend continues worldwide, what else needs to change for net radio to thrive? "One of the issues is what sort of device we have in 10 years time for receiving pictures and sound and everything. Will we have a mobile phone that does all of this and which will be able to get Internet radio?" asks the BBC's Torin Douglas. He continues: "I think its future is as a niche way of broadcasting, because it's still not very convenient, it's not as portable as a transistor radio - you can't pick it up free and quickly. All of those are advantages that radio already has - what the web is good at is reaching people a long way away, and adding information - text, pictures that radio can't provide." RAIN's Paul Maloney agrees that portability is the main issue: "One of the holy grails of the industry is to unleash it from the desktop and certainly when you can receive the Internet by walking from wi-fi location to wi-fi location without missing a beat then that will remove the biggest 'con' of this industry." In June 2003, the Streamguys challenged this problem and successfully received an in-car broadcast , suggesting the 'holy grail' may be within touching distance. Virgin's James Cridland is also looking forward to wireless technologies, but he notes other problems with them just now: "For a typical Virgin radio listener to use a mobile phone to listen to a low bit rate stream would cost £240/month, so from that point of view we have a long way to go. "
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| Can Peer to Peer Save the Day? | |||||
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"There are a lot of people already doing multicasting. Besides the royalties the biggest economic challenge facing webcasters is the cost of bandwidth and P2P will help that greatly," says Paul Maloney of Rain. He's not alone in his optimism for this method of broadcasting - Streamer (P2P software) author Iain McLeod sees it as the way forward: "I've created something that allows anyone to broadcast without having a lot of money or server bandwidth." IWA (Europe) Chairman Gavin Starks is also cautiously optimistic: "It's a real opportunity because you immediately reduce bandwidth costs, but you have to have a high volume of people to make it economically viable." However Interface's Eezee-E has encountered some problems: "In theory it all works very well, but in practice people are very stingy with their bandwidth, so its not gonna reach as many people as they think. Also, if the stream gets interrupted or you disconnect then people have to look for another user to connect to, so it is a complete mess, peer to peer streaming." Nonetheless, streaming expert Craig Moehl of Groovy Gecko is convinced : "It's essential because Internet radio is not cheap - especially when you become more successful costs can become prohibitive. Peer to Peer streaming is already taking a big load off that cost and eventually it may allow almost an infinite amount of people to receive your signal. The trade off is you can't guarantee the quality of the experience." |
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A Genuine Threat to the mainstream?
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"The music industry in general is very scared - historically, if you look at when Mp3 and Napster came out, they just tried to shut it down. It gives you an idea of the level of misinformation at that level that they thought they could just switch it off. All of the huge amount of hype around digital rights management has struggled to deliver," says IWA Chairman Gavin Starks. Denise Reiling from Adsertion sees net radio as developing more as a complementary medium: "I think it is another option. Traditional radio stations wouldn't be developing their own simulcast streams of their own stations if they didn't think it was viable - they're trying to leverage their own audience and keep them from going away to another Internet only station." However, the BBC's Torin Douglas is unconvinced that it can change the way we listen to radio: "It will always be a way to test out formats and reach an audience, but if you want to become a major radio station at some point you are going to have to be broadcasting in a conventional way." Perhaps the truth is that net radio can only succeed if it plays within the establishment's rules? Craig Moehl of Groovy Gecko certainly believes that attempts to webcast anything controversial may run into problems: "At the moment I don't believe they are (a threat), because the cost basis on which they have to be run on is prohibitive, and therefore you can only present them in a certain way. And to be profitable you have to tow those lines, because you don't want to upset anybody." |
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An
investigation by Michael Bickett,
MA Multi-Media Journalism. © 2003
