While music and video over the internet is getting common nowadays ceo's and program managers at broadcast organisations and companies are having their neck massaged on a daily basis now because they feel something threatening is coming up and they are desperately wondering what. They fear that for example, publishers will take over the complete broadcasting market within a short time. Companies who specialize in providing search results on the internet. Or cable and wireless telephone companies, those who bring the content to the customer. They have already been present on an international show of the broadcast industry.
Radio will stay the way it is. Television will change. It will merge into internet. Become 2 way. Content on demand. Paid for by the amount or sort of content that is watched. Advertised. Digitised.
The change in broadcast in general will be such that, no longer all content will get collected at one spot ( the studio ) and from there "broadcast" in a real-time and strict order, via one way to the listener.
A broadcast station will send a playlist while the content, that list points to is found at servers of the right owners i.e. publishers, record and film companies, news agencies.
This way the data from the broadcast studio is rather limited and can therefore be easily adapted to your personal taste. When you don't like a song or are not interested in a news message you can skip it and the rest of your program will shift forwards in stead of having a few minutes of silence. 2-way will make that the broadcaster will learn about your preferences or dislikes and adapt future programs for you.
When could such a thing happen ? Well as soon as the soft and hardware is available in a user friendly way. So there is work to do in transforming ipods and iphones into personal radio and tv receivers while also creating bigger equivalents for home use. And yes, one can already work this way with the current apparatus but customer acceptance demands these to become; dedicated, user friendly, good looking , good performing and one. So there is a lot of work to do.
Andre Schmeets has been involved in designing digital mixing consoles for broadcast and recording use and has been responsible for all technical matters of a public radio and television station where he was
involved in designing and installing all audio for a new built studio complex having 4 dedicated radio studio's 2 television studio's 1 overlapping, multifunctional studio, 12 edit studio's and 2 OB vans.