27 October 2010

Community radio broadcasting schmozzle

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times is struggling valiantly to make sense of the mess surrounding community radio broadcasting and their listener.

It seems they’re all meant to be broadcasting from an ancient antenna on Black Mountain Tower which should have been replaced four years ago.

Contracts with Broadcasting Australia have expired and while negotiations are supposed to have begun they haven’t yet reached the stage of having real numbers attached.

Should the ACT Government be getting involved?

Many councils build broadcast towers and rent them out to all comers.

Or for the numbers of listeners involved would a server in the TransACT data centre suffice to stream them?

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Thoroughly Smashed said :

I’m not sure that value proposition is going to convince too many people to listen to public/community radio.

Once again Canberra falls short of the standards set by its 2 big neighbors.

They could just send the listener a CD of recorded content every week.

Thoroughly Smashed12:14 pm 27 Oct 10

Certainly, but it does require you to own and pay for a 3G capable device. And 32Kb/s for 40 minutes every day would neatly eat up all of the data on your Telstra Next G $49 cap. Too bad if you wanted to listen to a higher quality stream at four times the bitrate.

All to listen to something that you used to for free on your car’s built-in radio. I’m not sure that value proposition is going to convince too many people to listen to public/community radio.

and their listener

Ha! I see what you did there!

Thoroughly Smashed11:56 am 27 Oct 10

I meant for the listener

Who better to pay? But 32Kbps stream for 40 minutes a day isn’t going to ad up to a hilarious YouTube vid.

Thoroughly Smashed11:50 am 27 Oct 10

johnboy said :

3G wireless can handle an audio stream pretty well.

That’s a pretty expensive way to listen to the radio

No more so than the spectrum allocation of broadcast radio for 20 listeners.

Growling Ferret11:38 am 27 Oct 10

Does 88.7 broadcast off this tower? Would explain the terrible range and coverage.

Streaming doesn’t work for those who listen to a station whilst driving.

3G wireless can handle an audio stream pretty well.

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