Broadcast Radio Loosing ground to Digital

From the "NO SHIT" Department comes this latest news about the decline in radio listeners occuring as more and more people move to subscription services like XM or Sirius.

The short version is that Radio is in decline due to increasing popularity of sattelite radio. The no shit part is because anyone that listens much to radio these days know it has some serious problems. One, music stations generally just re-play the same 20 songs or so over and over and over. Two, DJ's no longer have any distinct personality or freedom to play new or non-mainstream music. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they break up the re-plays with seemingly unceasing advertisements with even less variety than the music.

By contrast Sattelite radio provides far more variety (more channles) with far better reception quality (close to CD quality) and no advertising since the service is subscription based. Off hand I imagine sattellite radio is going to follow a very similar path to that of cable. IE that is right now the subscription base keeps ads largely out but as more and more people move to it (50million and counting now) there will be a lot of incentive by providers to allow advertisers some premium slots to add to their income. It will slowly grow until there are ever larger amounts of advertisements same as their are on subscription cable TV now whereas when it first began there were almost no commercials.

In the future my guess is we will see a move to internet based radio distributed via wireless internet. Already in some cities it would be feasible to rig a wireless solution in your car that could listen to almost any regular broadast station and quite a few internet only stations including a great deal of the content you would pay for from sattellite radio with similar quality. The barrier to that revolution for the time being is the cost of a mobile internet connection service costs, and low amont of coverage (compared to traditional broadcast and sattellite). However the equipment is pretty cheap and easily on par with sattellite and the spread of services and coverage are already starting the inevitable downward spiral of cost. Before we realize it mobile connections will be on par with current home conenction cost levels for constant broadband coverage wherever we may roam. At that time Sattelite is going to become the next 8 track... or in otherwords the intermediate technology that gets quickly bowled over by something better. Net infrastructure is far far far more upgradable than orbital infrastructure at far chepaer prices. So it won't take to long before mobile net conenctions will be able to proivde more than sattelite and it will get cheaper faster. Really I just don't see a way for sattellite to win in the long run given cheap mobile internet connection ability. At least not as content broadcasters. There could deffinatly be a role for sattelites in providing mobile internet connections... always has had that potential but we have got to get launching, capable enough sats cheap enough to make it feasible.

In addition to live content this would also provide the capacity for on demand content by requesting media files. And access to home content via wan access to your home systems. Sattellite just dosn't have the capacity to deal with on demman for million of users.