Once considered an old-media dinosaur and something of a novelty for cube dwellers in the Net's early days, radio today is claiming a fat chunk of digital bandwidth. Hundreds of companies and thousands of radio stations are using the Internet to woo a new generation of listeners. And even as innovative audio components, tuning technologies, and software programs come to market, terrestrial broadcasters are fine-tuning the traditional model to shape the present and cast the future of radio. Radio stations see opportunities on the Net but are hamstrung by microscopic budgets and lack of focus. The Arbitron Company estimates that in the U.S. there are about 12,000 licensed radio stations, both online and off, and another 3,000 Internet-only stations.
Net radio is available in three flavors.
Requiring no interaction and the least technological know-how, commercial simulcasting reflects the earliest efforts of broadcasters to add functionality to their Web sites and appeal to a potentially global audience. The terrestrial broadcast signal is converted at the station itself to one that can be heard over the Web. Before the broadcast feed is sent to its transmitter, the audio channel is diverted to a server that forwards it to an Internet rebroadcaster, such as RealNetworks' RealAudio. There, the station's audio signal is translated into streaming data, assigned a unique URL and moved online. The entire procedure happens nearly instantaneously, long before the signal reaches a radio tower or hits the airwaves.