Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Beginning of the End for Satellite Radio

Satellite Radio vs. the Dodo revisited

Back in 2005 in my Circles Around the Square blog (a thing tied to the CBC lockout) I expressed more than a few future of satellite radio.
"Soon, very, very soon - anything available online, and much that isn't available online yet will be available to anyone, anywhere, on their pda, cell phone, iPod, laptop or, of course, desktop. People will be able to listen to literally thousands of radio stations across the world, a small (very small) sampling of them are available on this site, and there are about 10,000 available here, even on publicbroadcasting.ca there are over 120 public, university and community radio stations listed. Then, add to this all of the available podcasts and now vidcasts, and the fact that TV will soon be as available as radio online (there are a few thousand feeds here already) and then peoples private collection of music and video plus, of course, video games, email, web sites, text messaging, phone calls...

Once all of this is available to you whereever you are, on virtually any device, largely for free (or for the cost of your cell/internet connection, who exactly is going to be paying "$14.99 per month" for "100 commercial free stations" on a separate, proprietary, device that doesn't do anything else?"
I won't even bother going into how far the internet/wi-fi/etc has come since 2005. But I thought it was worth mentioning that you can now buy a variety of internet radios for your home - that is radios that will play any of the tens of thousands of stations you can get online.













Cell phones and ipods that do this will be right behind I'm sure. If the CBC is short of funds they might want to see if anyone wants half of Sirus at a very reasonable price.

2 comments:

dan said...

i am not shore that this is the beginning of the end internet radio will always be a good way to listing to online radio.

Dwight Williams said...

As for regular "over the air" radio, I'm not sure we're done with that yet either.