On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:15:08 +0100, "Serge Auckland"
wrote:


"Don Pearce" wrote in message
news:4a47a781.1080618593@localhost...
On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:25:39 +0100, "Keith G"
wrote:




I wonder if they can survive in anything other than legacy mode once
the mainstream is entirely digital. At first there will be plenty of
old FM radios to give them an audience (although you might argue that
the typical current FM radio owner won't be their target audience),
but they will die out as they are no longer made. I'm not sure I would
want to start a new service based on obsolete technology.


I wasn't thinking so much of the receivers - although there'll be
mountains
of them in the landfill come the day, especially when you factor in all
the
car radios, but also of the transmitting gear. I don't know what's
involved
to broadcast 'to the horizon' as you say, but what with local businesses
trying to compete with the Internet and the 'ethnic diversity' of certain
regions, I still see at least decades of usefulness in a network of truly
'local FM' stations.

Or am I just whistling in the breeze?

Reminds me that I bought a block of Chiltern Radio shares when they were
floated (we had an office in Luton at the time) but sold them at a small
profit a year later when I realised I didn't want to get into all that. I
wonder what they would be worth now? - A fraction of, I suspect, as I
gather
the station has been ruined!



Unfortunately local radio tends to descend pretty rapidly into either
a jukebox or the direst of phone-ins - the only options they can ever
afford. You got out of that the best way you could, I think.

d

That may be true of local Commercial radio, but you're forgetting about
Community Radio. These stations are staffed largely by volunteers, with
paid employees kept to a minimum, possibly no more than one or two. They are
often Registered Charities, and can get things done that would be impossible
to a Commercial station that would have to pay for the programme content,
whether through salaries or by purchase from independent producers.


I'm sure, but such systems can really only work when they sit amongst
real, paying systems. Ofcom is not going to reserve spectrum for a
non-paying medium - the bean counters run the show these days.

My own Hospital Radio station has just been awarded a Community license by
Ofcom, and we see CR being what Local Commercial Radio should have been,
i.e. local, producing programmes of local interest by and for locals, not
networked jukeboxes. Community Radio is relatively new, and perhaps it will
take time to settle down, but if any CR becomes a jukebox or just a phone-in
channel for whingers, then they won't meet their Promise of Performance, and
Ofcom will shut them down.

S.

www.radiowestsuffolk.co.uk

People will have to complain loud and long before Ofcom shut a station
down. They take no executive action unbidden.

d