And if the licenses could be affordable, perhaps it would be possible to raise funds for people to do low power radio in that space? I don't know if it would be legal to do it that way, but if somebody presented the FCC with a plan (including details of how they'd self-regulate), perhaps they'd accept it?
Actually, I kinda doubt it. I think radio is a lot like landline telephones: it's "dying", but it's taking a long time because there's a bunch of dinosaurs who still use it and won't quit until they're dead. (Disclaimer: I listen to radio in my car sometimes, but only NPR, not anything commercial.)
So basically there's a captive audience here that won't go away any time soon, and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff. It's not a growth sector for sure, but it is something a company can put minimal investment into and milk for profit. This is seen now with landline phone service: it's gotten really unreliable in many places these days because the infrastructure is decaying and companies are spending the absolute minimum to keep it going, but they're milking it for profit from all the dinosaurs who refuse to give it up.
Citation? I haven't heard anything about this and I work closely with telecom.
> and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff.
You know, Slashdot was never quite this toxic back in the day.
It's what I've seen with some of my family that lives in smaller towns or rural areas. Some crappy company like CenturyLink buys up the infrastructure and then just lets it rot, but charges huge prices for phone service, higher than cellular service. Then service quality is poor and outages are common.
>You know, Slashdot was never quite this toxic back in the day.
How on earth is it "toxic" to state a fact? Older people are generally easier to manipulate, which is why there's laws against "elder abuse". Are you going to try to claim now that dementia doesn't exist, because that's "ageist"?
That's not true.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3525123/Generation-...
Partial citations can be very misleading...
That's absolutely not the reason laws like that exist, unless you consider the neglected elderly who are ignored in places like hospice care facilities as having been 'manipulated'.
I think that's a grossly overbroad definition of the phrase.
He doesn't even listen to radio! It's beneath him!
I would consider actively switching if there were an alternative that was strictly better. Something with the quality of at least HD radio and the reliability and accessibility of FM radio, for instance.
I tried out SiriusXM when I got my new car, because they had a free 6-month trial. It was truly awful (even in a car, which doesn't exactly have a great environment for listening to music), so I quickly gave up on it.
I thought you were kidding though, so I looked it up, and Wikipedia[0] confirms it:
> Each two-carrier group broadcast 100 8-kilobit-per-second streams in approximately 4 MHz of radio spectrum. These streams were combined using a patented process to form a variable number of channels using a variety of bitrates. Bandwidth is separated into segments of 4-kilobit-per-second virtual "streams" which are combined to form audio and data "channels" of varying bitrates from 4 to 64 kilobits-per-second.
Wow. I thought they just used satellite internet and streamed from their servers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio#Technology
It might sound better to you because you're only listening to the channels they allocate the maximum bitrate to (i.e., the most popular ones). I don't listen to pop, so the stuff I tried listening to (hard rock and metal) sounded like total shit.
Here's a test for you: rip your favorite CD into FLAC, then encode this into a bunch of different MP3 or AAC streams of different bitrates. See what they sound like at 32kbps or worse. If that bitrate actually sounds fine to you, you might want to visit an audiologist and get your hearing checked. 64kbps will probably sound OK, depending on the codec (Ogg Vorbis and probably AAC will sound noticeably better than MP3), but nothing is going to sound good at 32 or less.
In short, XM does not have enough spectrum available to stream all those channels at a high-quality bitrate, so they devised this wacky scheme to allow them to broadcast some things at higher bitrates than others. While you don't need a high bitrate for talk radio of course, they also relegate many other music channels to lower bitrates, resulting in poor audio quality. Why would I pay $12/month or whatever for this? These days, if you insist on streaming music, you're better off just using your phone with a high or unlimited data plan and listening to Spotify or similar.
As an aside, SiriusXM isn't just broadcast from satellites; they also broadcast in cities from terrestrial towers, because in cities the reception from the satellites frequently isn't good (too many tall buildings and tunnels, too much multipath distortion, etc.). This doesn't change the spectrum allocation they're granted though.
When the same corporate owner controls multiple radio stations in the same market, the listening experience sucks. I've recently started spending time with someone that listens to the local hip-hop stations (there are 2). They play the same 5 songs all day long. They go to commercial at the same time. They have the exact same format where each station has the same concept show at the same time. Just pick the on-air personalities you like better. I would be totally expect to find the same style station from the same owners in other cities would follow the exact same formula.