That’s the opinion of Edison Research
[Simulcast streaming means taking your over the air licensed radio station and putting it on the internet]
No, it’s much worse than that. At a typical time, 2 million people are listening to Pandora, 300,000 to all iHeartRadio stations combined. Radio adding streaming is like an old man thinking he looks young by wearing a hairpiece.
On demand content is the end of commercial radio as we know it. I read today that 60% of searches are now being done from mobile devices. Streaming to the desktop has no future. Neither does News, weather, traffic and sports scores and lottery numbers at the top of the hour. Polka music, perhaps.
“Neither does News, weather, traffic and sports scores and lottery numbers at the top of the hour.” I never understood why it has hung on so long… like the evening newspapers did for a while.
I know you watch less TV than I do, but I caught a local news broadcast for the first time in years and they had the weather on not once, but several different times during the half hour. Seems like a losing formula to me unless a major tornado is in the immediate area. (It wasn’t)
Time to pull the plug on the high power radio transmissions and instead stream. Remember that video of someone climbing up to service a high power transmission line that we discussed here on this blog approximately 2 years ago?
https://vine.co/v/OdxDHgbQzQP
I bet that hurt.
He needed a bifurcated splicer.
Over in Nigeria, they punch holes in the pipeline to steal the oil, then blame the oil companies for burning down their homes when it explodes.
It was shocking. I expect he is now more well grounded.
Deeply grounded
Can’t be sure, but I have been unable to unearth another video of him.
I’ve been thinking it over, and I vote that the video was a fake.
Instead of WhatsApp, it is WattZap. 😉
Serious reply on “stagnant” – a lot of these stations ask you to register with personal details and then when you do and are outside the USA they still block you because you have a non-USA IP address.
I had figured out the actual streams of several stations I would listen to and most of them were blocked. Several were not if I accessed them directly, but if I accessed them via TuneIn, TuneIn blocked them.
I ended up forced to listen to Coast2CoastAM through its Canadian affiliates.
Years later, I still remember how they were hostile to their own registered users.
There are two ways to listen when outside the USA – the first is via a VPN and they are about $5 per month or $50 per year. The second is via a DNS service that starts the I believe starts the stream using its IP address, then hands you the URL to play it directly from the streamer. One example in this category is https://tvunblock.com/
So how is Belize?
The copyright issue and legal uncertainty just grows when you cross international boundaries. At one point the CRTC (the Canadian agency similar to the FCC but 100x more powerful in their minds) wanted to force US stations that allowed their streams into Canada to abide by Domestic Content regulations and not contaminate the Canadian culture. When the Internet stopped laughing at that idea, they then went with Ok, your U.S. Stations can pollute Canada, but only if you contribute to a fund for Canadian artists, even if you play no music by Canadians. Clear Channel long ago said Screw It and just blocked the streams. I’m not sure of the current state of iHeartradio outside the U.S.
The Nextradio app for Android requires you to enable location services at all times, to allegedly “get you the list of radio stations you should be able to hear” – I guess the FM tuner can’t just “scan” for them. You also must plug in headphones to get a workable antenna, even if you aren’t listening on them. The most bizarre feature is you can tune your android phone to an FM station, then connect it by cable to your home stereo system. How clueless is that?
International borders have always been an interest of mine because of they are acts of politics rather than nature. Several “San Diego” stations – radio and TV – are actually in Mexico but broadcast in English and are affiliated with US networks. There is also the Montreal area station on the US side of the border that has the call letters of the nearby Montreal airport as someone here pointed out.
One of my friends on the Ohio – Michigan border had to watch the 2012 Olympics on CBC TV on his cable system because NBC wanted to charge a high price for the over-the-air content and the cable company went with the CBC instead. That is also an interesting grey area as NBC had exclusive USA rights to the games and the CBC had exclusive Canadian rights, but his home is close enough to the border that he gets the CBC-TV over the air and the cable company provides it because it is a local channel.
Two places I lived in Michigan had the CBC on cable. Seeing Olympics coverage on a non-US feed just makes it all the more clear how it is driven by nationalism and ratings, not excellence. Where the events are not carried live (hard to do with 20 things going on at the same time), you know there will only be coverage of events where the U.S. (Or Canada on the CBC) is expected to win, and if the “home team” doesn’t win, the coverage will be brief or focused on how the other country cheated… Or elevating non-competitive social icons like the Jamaican bobsled team.
So true. I grew up in the northeast where my favorite sports teams were withing 300 miles from many of their arch rivals. As a radio fan, when I was about 10 years old, I would often listen to the opposing team’s radio announcers and be astounded at how different they viewed the games.
I also happened to be vising Germany in the early 90s and there was lots of discussion on how they should take care of their Vietnam veterans. My German isn’t that good and it took me several moments to realize they were talking about the advisers to North Vietnam that were sent from East Germany.
Somewhat ironically, Eric Burdon was visiting Germany from England and did a radio interview in English on another German radio station talking about his song “Sky Pilot” that became very popular among American serviceman in Vietnam.
Back in my AOL days (1995ish), AOL entered into a deal to allow Germans to subscribe to AOL – when they started showing up in AOL chat rooms, most people thought they were fake – because I paid close attention, I knew they were real.
I remember in particular a conversation with a former East German who explained that U.S. troops were still in Germany 50 years after the war ended not to protect Germany from Russia, but to suppress Germany’s potential to dominate Europe again.
Worth knowing and/or remembering is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was an East German. Pushing her to pick a fight with Russia has limits. Add to that the problems with Greece and Iran, and the U.S. may be eating sauerkraut if we keep it up.
This is meant as a reply to Art’s post re: Angela Merkel. Merkel is not only East German born and bred, she chose to be very active in the Communist Youth organization:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2328536/Angela-Merkel-Communist-links-new-image-uniform-released.html
I would not expect her to ever turn against Mother Russia from which the “milk” of Marxist-Leninist “honey” flows.
Foyle, great to see you again. I don’t know Merkel well enough to psychoanalyze her but I know that the Russians were cruel masters over East Germany. For example, when I drove into downtown Dresden in 1993, I was stunned to see the city in rubble….. from the Allied Bombing 50 years earlier. The Russians would not let them clean it up or rebuild.
The Russians and Germans had fought hard against each other so I would expect the opposite of what you expect.
Word of caution – I would suggest avoiding these DNS sites unless you know one really well. It is easy to set up fake DNS entries to send you to a fake bank rather than your real bank and then steal your login information. Be very careful.
Re: Merkel
Back in 2003, I went to a theater with my then “girlfriend” in California to see Good Bye Lenin (my idea). Part of the reason was to evaluate how deep and true her political beliefs are.
The premise is a bit odd, but made an interesting story. Mom was in an accident before East Germany fell. She had been a party member and true believer. She woke up from the coma after liberation – her doctor warned the kids that if she learned the truth, she might die from the shock. So the kids have to work very hard to convince her that nothing had changed, and the Communists were still in charge.
I won’t spoil the ending and I’m not sure it actually came to any conclusion. So if I go into a coma and wake up in 2018, tell me that the U.S. is still free and McDonalds still exists
Speaking of AOL, Verizon is buying them. I didn’t know AOL is still around. I saw the old AOL buildings in Ashburn off 28 last week, they are still there.
Oh well, no one is showing up for the Barack foreign summit @ Camp David either. I bet the local goats in Maryland are happy about that ! LOL
parrott
Parrott great to see you again, but this is the streamingradioguide website, not the findanisp website. lol.
Kidding aside, I was watching Bloomberg this morning when they broke the news. Evidently, AOL is now longer a content or a dial-up company but a company with a special product for delivering targeted ads and that is the reason that Verizon is buying them.
If you have a Verizon phone or a Verizon FIOS box, look out. I switched from the Verizon DVR to a Windows DVR almost exclusively because of all the ads on the Verizon DVR – every few lines on the program guide was an add. Pop-up ads on the DVR and “important messages” were almost exclusively ads for video on demand. I went with a cable card to avoid all that. Maybe AOL can help them.
I was just looking at AOL’s web site the otherday to see what they are still doing. My female friend still clings to her prestigious @aol.com account.
After Steve Case and Bob Pittman “took over” Time Warner using highly inflated stock based on bogus accounting, the “powers that be” spit out the AOL company and sent the boys packing – Pittman wound up at Clear Channel to work his magic there.
A few years ago, AOL was acquired by / combined with Huffington Post mainly as a content provider. They still do offer dialup access. The 1996 telecom reform act that deregulated phone service and technology changes allowed Verizon to become an Internet player all around the country in the former Bell Operating Company territories, which is most of the country.
CC, do you run a blog I can go troll for fun? lol
Sorry, Art. I see that I have made a lot of posts in recent days. I will cut back.. I just really enjoy the articles and conversation… didn’t mean to monopolize the blog.
Just don’t poke sticks at me and I’ll be happy. At least you let me know I’m still alive.
Glad you are still alive. Hope you are doing well.
Didn’t intend to poke sticks at anyone… was just thinking that AOL hadn’t gotten such attention since the days of FindanISP. Interestingly, you mentioned AOL just hours before their big announcement today.
Democrats also voted HELL NO to giving Obama authority to negotiate a trade deal with Asia. It’s like they don’t trust him or something.
Verizon is moving forward with using its bandwidth to support multicast over wireless. This could be the “end game” for radio’s future. The current one user, one stream model breaks because it wastes the limited bandwidth. Multicast feeds one copy of the stream and only if at least one person in range of the cell tower wants it. In a place with a high concentration of people listening to the same radio station (or watching the same TV show), multicast wins. Longer term, I could see Verizon or AT&T becoming the operators of a DAB like FM replacement where they would multiplex all of the FM stations in a local area similar to the technology used by Sirius XM, but locally. The FCC coerced the Coast Guard to give up a big chunk of spectrum it owns for coastal radar.
Killer ,
Many of the cable companies in the northeast (Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner) have rolled out “multicast” wifi. They have to keep it very low power as the FCC requires, but have a single userid/password for all their wifi hotspots so you can roam seamlessly. Each customer typically gets five userids – one for each phone or other device.
All the routers they supply have a VLAN-like (not VLAN but similar) feature where other customers are permitted to connect and use your bandwidth. When you leave home, you can use their bandwidth… similar to cell phone technology.
They claim the routers have two transmitters and the public wifi side uses a different channel than what you’re paying for. The only extra expense to you is a trivial amount of electricity to run the second transmitter
Interesting. It is a little more than the WIFI channels as you can not see the customers that connect and they can not see your internal home network.
If they are using a separate RF channel, then it should not affect your WIFI bandwidth…. wondering whether it would affect your internet bandwidth from your router to the internet itself.
Either way, it is a good idea… and interesting that Google now sells phones that leverage WIFI first before using the cellular phone networks.
The answer is maybe. Internet over cable was an afterthought using “empty TV channels”, and one empty channel to upload to the Internet. Since the users on the same headend share and compete for control of the upload channel which is also how acknowledgements are sent, a heavy uploaded (ie Bittorrent) can slow the entire neighborhood
That’s right. I was talking with a Cablevision installer recently and he indicated he was rolling out new cable modems with higher bandwidth than when I had been their customer (I left when fiber made its way to my home with Fios). The new modems use more channels for the internet than the old ones.
DOCSIS 3.0 standard. Instead of using 4 MHz per channel (1hz is many bits due to magic) it supports wider channels up beyond the range used by TV and smarter management of the upload channel. They are ultimately stuck with the legacy of coax and have to worry about it leaking signals that break other stuff.
Exactly right. DOCSIS 3.0. normally with WIFI turned on.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/05/20/sick-from-wifi/
I go back to the day when WIFI was only on 92.5 MHz…. and only in Philadelphia. 😉