“In 2009, Internet radio may not just reinvigorate the medium of radio. It may reinvent it.” This prediction comes from the consulting firm Deloitte, which has published annual reports on upcoming media trends for the last eight years.

If the report is correct, 2009 will see much more widespread adoption of WiFi enabled internet radio sets (like the one pictured above). These sets, which retail for about $200, are designed to connect to digital radio signals from around the world via the internet.

“It’s the future of radio,” Alex Bowden, a salesman at Bay and Bloor Radio in downtown Toronto, said to The Financial Post. He said the store has seen an uptick in sales of the devices, especially over Christmas, as prices have gone down.

Deloitte sees this as a major opportunity for radio broadcasters.

There are about 2.5 billion analog radio sets in the world, and conventional radio broadcasts will continue to serve those listeners for the next few years, but the internet has 1.5 billion users, two-thirds of which have broadband. Serving the internet market properly could lead to substantial numbers of new listeners both from people listening at work on computers and from these new digital radio sets.

Digital radio also has the advantage over satellite radio in that the sets usually don’t require subscriptions. Currently only about a quarter of the worlds 44,000 radio stations broadcast online but that will likely increase as digital radio sets become more popular.

Not everyone agrees on the potential for internet radio though. David Bray, a radio industry analyst, told the The Financial Post, it was “wildly improbable,” that internet radio would led to widespread shift. He said it’s too early to tell if most consumers would spend a couple hundred dollars on new sets.

The Deloitte report concludes that although digital radio represents a big opportunity for broadcasters, they need to make the station easy to search and find by building electronic program guides and recommendation engines. Broadcasters also need to ensure that ensure that their content is listing on the large aggregators site like RadioTower. Finally there are still issues that need to be resolved about music royalties.

What do you think? Will internet radio change the face of the medium, or will it another internet related innovation that doesn’t live up to its promise?

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	Digital Radio	Posted at 11:31 am (23 Jan 2009)

The CBC’s Toronto broadcast centre will host an interesting panel Wednesday on the future of news. It’ll explore how technology — such as citizen journalism and Web 2.0 tools — can be used by the media to provide greater public service to citizens and communities.

Participants include:

• Andrew Keen, author, The Cult of the Amateur
• Leonard Brody, CEO, NowPublic.com
• Rahaf Harfoursh, Research Coordinator, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”

There are only a handful of public seats available, so you may want to tune in online. It’ll be streamed live at cbc.ca/futureofnews (where a discussion forum is open now) and segments from the discussion will appear on CBC TV and CBC Radio.

Happens Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time.

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	Digital Radio, Interactive TV, On-Demand TV	Posted at 5:38 am (16 Oct 2007)

CBC is getting closer to providing live digital TV and digital radio broadcasts to cell phones.

CBC recently wrapped up a successful mobile broadcast multimedia field trial using “T-DMB” technology in the Greater Montreal area. The trial broadcasted two live TV services and multiple live radio services within its existing digital radio broadcasting channel.

T-DMB is one of the technologies that permits the delivery of multimedia content to mobile and handheld devices for multiple simultaneous users using a hybrid broadcast/cellular network. A news release from CBC said the trial was “a good example of how CBC/Radio-Canada will make more efficient use of its digital radio transmitter network, frequencies and licences in the future.”

Many industry analysts believe that live multimedia represents the next growth area in mobile convergence. There are a number of systems for delivery of multimedia content to mobile users in development and CBC/Radio-Canada is carefully monitoring trials in this area, including T-DMB.

T-DMB, which is based on an extension of the “DAB” digital radio system, allows delivery of television as well as radio. Now commercially available in South Korea and Germany, T-DMB has proven to be a very efficient means of broadcasting live TV, multimedia and digital radio content to mobile users. It can significantly reduce the network congestion issues associated with some existing mobile TV services which use conventional cellular networks, and it allows an unlimited number of users at any one time to access live digital TV and digital radio via mobile and handheld devices.

The broadcasting infrastructure and frequencies for “DAB” digital radio are already in place in many countries. It is robust and reliable, and can be easily extended to deliver multimedia and video in a spectrum-efficient way. There is also the synergy of being able to deliver digital radio programs to the same receivers, which appears to be popular with users.

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	Digital Radio, Transmission	Posted at 3:08 pm (27 Aug 2007)

This morning, the CRTC renewed the digital radio licences of the CBC and other broadcasters.

Whew! That’s a relief. I was losing sleep over those eight listeners who actually own digital radio receivers.

Digital radio, technically speaking, is considered superior in quality and reception. It exists on a separate frequency band (unlike the amusing but doomed “AM stereo” experiments from years back) and so you need special DAB (digital audio broadcasting) receivers to pick it up.

But good luck finding a receiver. Radio Sha…er, The Source… stopped selling them a couple of years ago. No buyers.

The Benefits Aren’t Compelling

Really, who could blame us consumers. There’s very little compelling reason to switch over to digital radio. The two reasons most industry enthusiasts point to for the DAB side:

1. You can stream data along with the audio. This lets you show the song name, etc.
2. The audio quality is better.

But nothing is ever as simple as that. In reality:

1. Data: There’s very little value-add for the listener. Sure, I can see the name of the song playing on the DAB receiver’s screen. Or I can wait until the DJ tells me the song name. Private radio got excited because they could, in theory, send driving directions to advertisers’ stores, or display an advertiser’s phone number during their ad. Big deal.
2. Quality: It’s not as good as they say. Yes, provided you’re in clear reception, it sounds amazing. But step behind a tall building or drive into a valley and you get the usual digital muddiness as the receiver struggles to figure out how to play decent quality with fewer compressed packets.

So really, why would I shell out for a digital radio receiver to listen to CBC Radio One, when I can pick it up just fine on my existing radios.
What We Should Do

Giving airtime to upcoming Canadian musicians is partly our mandate. While we do that through CBC Radio 3′s Sirius channel, satellite radio requires a monthly subscription, whereas DAB does not.

We should use our digital radio transmitters to broadcast CBC Radio 3. The R3 folks have proven themselves to be highly adaptive (dare I say — “flexible”?) and have an excellent track record at using early-stage technologies.

What do you think?

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	CBC Radio 3, Digital Radio	Posted at 11:51 am (13 Aug 2007)