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Page 1 of 2 This week all of us here at The Net Untangled will be looking at internet streaming for radio stations. Over the past few weeks, I've written about how it is time to get into the streaming game if you're station hasn't already. With wireless internet becoming more ubiquitous and soon available to pipe internet audio streams through car speakers, online competition will soon be making serious inroads into normally terrestrial radio turf.
So why shouldn't radio take the battle to their turf? Radio is already doing the heavy lifting of content production, why not make it available online?
Michael King, President of Abacast
- an online audio streaming provider - agrees. When radio stations
recently began resuming streaming on the internet, "Internet-only radio
stations began complaining of a loss of listeners to terrestrial
stations online." Radio already has the name recognition, promotions
and content in place - radio is already many steps ahead of the game -
it only has to start getting online.
The main difference between streaming online and traditional
broadcast radio is the business model - in regards to listeners. For
the last almost 100 years, the costs of broadcasting have been largely
fixed. Sure, they've increased along with inflation - but the cost of
broadcasting a signal does not change depending on how many listeners
tune in. So the profit model is pretty simple. Get as many listeners as
you can, and each additional listener increases profit and not cost.
With internet streaming, the cost of broadcasting is bandwidth. When
each additional listener signs on, broadcasters have to pay for the
bandwidth for the audio stream to reach them. As a result, now online
stations pay more when they have more listeners. If the revenue
generated per listener is less than the cost of bandwidth per listener,
a station will never get above water, no matter how many listeners they
draw. This was the problem that all of those dot com bust companies
faced a few years back. If you're losing money on every customer,
that's not a problem that volume can fix.
As time marches on, bandwidth costs become lower. All technology
tends to become cheaper over time as new methods are developed. As
bandwidth gets cheaper, the business model makes more sense, because
you're still making more money when you add a listener. (All of this
is, of course, not taking into account of the advantage that radio has,
in that it doesn't cost them any more to produce content online since
it's already paying for it to broadcast over the air.) However, these
changes are slow and evolutionary.
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is the Chief Programmer and Co-Creator of Preppermint and is also the most likely among us to become an assassin. After serving in the Air Force and the Army's 82nd Airborne, Anthony grew tired of being able to kill people 67 ways with his bare hands. He and Chris came up with this idea to revolutionize web publishing, and he is the only one of the two smart enough to write it. Anthony spends most of his day fielding high paying job offers for his .NET programming skills. 
is the Executive Producer and Co-Creator of Preppermint. He also writes a column on radio and the internet for AllAccess called "The Net Untangled" For a profession, he is an idea man who wondered why you needed to email a web guy to put your prep on your website. Then he wondered if he was able to concentrate hard enough to grow his toenails faster. He can. 
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