What’s broadcast?
Posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 9:38pm. #
Jeff Jarvis writes a piece arguing that broadcasting is (nearly) dead:
So do we tear down the broadcast towers? Not yet. But very soon, the cost benefit of owning that license and equipment will fall to nearly nil (one wonders when delivering via wi-fi mesh networks in cities and satelllite in boonies will become more effective and profitable — perhaps even now). Local TV licenses used to be money machines; now they’re shrinking. Viewership for networks of those stations continues to fall year after year, of course. The barrier to entry to making and now distributing TV is gone. Radio is arguably in better shape so long as we drive and satellite and radio-via-phone grow to critical mass, joining the iPod. And the radio business sucks.
I’m dubious. ‘Very soon’, a broadcasting licence will become worthless? Hardly.
Right now, people in the UK spend 11 hours and 20 minutes online every week, while spending 23.9 hours every week listening to the radio (and heaven knows how much television on top of that). Even against the venerable radio, broadcasting’s dominating the media landscape. Still.
The iPod, critical mass? Hardly. For all its bluster, iPods are a minority interest; while UK sales figures are difficult to come by, if Jeff’s claiming that there are more iPods out there than mobile-phones-with-radio, then he’s wrong. Some figures point total worldwide iPod sales to be 40m or thereabouts; 60% of new mobile phones have an FM radio in them, and Nokia will ship 80m of them this year.
It’s too easy to write off radio, and broadcasting, as a terminally ill patient. The death of broadcasting, just like the death of many other things, is easy to predict, but stubbornly fails to happen. To claim that broadcast licences will be worthless ‘very soon’ is hyperbole; and I suspect that the longer we cry wolf in this way, the harder it’ll be to spot the time when, in the future, broadcasting really starts seriously dying.
