Future of Media Summit Blog

Broadcast radio effectively ended on Friday 11 July 2008. While it may take some time for the implications to work themselves out - perhaps as much as a decade - historians will stick a marker in the ground, noting that the release of iPhone 3G spelled the beginning of the end for radio broadcasting.

Why is this?

Last year I was invited to give a private talk to the online services crew for Triple-M, Australia's "adult rock" radio station. Radio had not, to that point, seen any serious numbers showing audience erosion - unlike television and motion pictures. This, I suggested, was simply a case of technological overhang - the facilities for hyperdistribution of media were most actively applied to television and movies, after having decimated the recording industry.

Although television broadcasting, per se, has largely been unaffected by hyperdistribution, pre-produced (that is, non-live) television programs are now hyperdistributed globally immediately after being broadcast anywhere. There is no market for repeats, and there's a slowly shrinking market for first-to-air broadcasts of pre-produced programming, simply because there's a hyperabundance of it available through so many other outlets.

While it has proved difficult (though certainly not impossible) to live stream broadcast television over the Internet, radio stations have been live streaming for well over a decade - ever since NPR started streaming "All Things Considered" using the then-brand-new RealAudio player.

What's to keep this off iPhone 3G?

I note with some dismay that I can not drag an ".m3u" file to my iPhone - a data nugget which points to a streaming audio server. iTunes informs me that iPhone 3G will not play this file. This is not because of any hardware constraint on iPhone 3G. Rather, this is purely a software issue, and one that is liable to be fixed very quickly, either by Apple or by a third party. Already, Americans can enjoy Pandora, which live-streams music - though Pandora is not available in Australia due to various copyright restrictions. But the general facility to play any streaming audio source can not be very far behind. The lack of it in iPhone and iPod Touch seems somehow deliberate: both of these devices are easily capable of handling the data traffic (over WiFi, prior to the HSDPA upgrade for iPhone 3G) and playback without unduly stressing themselves. And it seems such a useful thing - Apple lists hundreds of streaming radio stations in iTunes - that there must be some business reason holding Apple back.

After all, I can play streaming YouTube videos - that facility is part of the baseline software installed on iPhone and iPod Touch. So what is going on here?

Update -- Jono Haysom pointed me to NullRiver's "Tuner" application - which costs AU $5.99, and has a list of several thousand participating streaming stations. This means the end of radio has truly begun. But still no explanation why this isn't part of the basic functionality of iPhone/iPod Touch.

From a business perspective, once arbitrary streaming audio files come to iPhone and iPod Touch, the entire rationale for radio broadcasting begins to collapse. Why listen to your local radio stations, when you can listen to any station, anywhere? Before iPhone 3G you were constrained to a local, fast wireless connection - but with iPhone 3G you've got the necessary bandwidth, everywhere you go.

This presents another conundrum, this one for the carriers. The 3G carriers - everywhere - have built their networks on an assumption of low duty-cycle usage from their customers. The data plans on offer show that they really do think people will use iPhone for voice and text, not so much for data. I am beginning to believe that the killer app for 3G is radio - which is both perverse and unexpected. And, once a sufficient number of iPhone 3G users understand that their iPhone 3G is actually an excellent, worldwide radio receiver, they'll be begin to use this feature - a lot. Then, in the words of one employee of a major Australian telco, "That's when our equipment catches fire."

I warned the folks at Triple-M that the day was surely coming when 3G devices would be ubiquitous enough that they would begin to supplant broadcasting. That day has now come, and it waits only for a small software upgrade - or Apple iTunes App Store application - to bring it to fruition.