All rights reserved. Two recent examples follow. Already, some fifteen months before the scheduled launch of the new network, such entertainment and news giants as USA Today, CNN, Black Entertainment Television, C-Span, the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, and AsiaOne, among others, have signed on to carry their programming to a nationwide audience. It's the same as television before the age of cable and satellites. Listeners have very few options, and the quality of sound can vary a great deal, since it's analog.
Radio is one of the last communication media to go digital.
While radios are of course used at home and in the office, the market is primarily driven by the mobile listener. As the name implies, this new nationwide network will be distributed by satellite. This means that radio stations can now have a nationwide audience, making niche, or special interest, programming possible, something not economically viable in the much smaller markets available to local radio stations in the past. LCC's part in the system is to boost coverage in selected areas with terrestrial RF repeaters that receive the satellite signals and re-broadcast them in more conventional fashion. The concept was tested last year by LCC, and a two-year program to build out the nationwide infrastructure is now under way.