Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site
In the Forum: Off Air Audio
In the Thread: Where are our good Tuners?
Post Subject: The price of program materialPosted by Paul S on: 3/31/2008
Maybe the low "consumer" cost of FM program material damps the industry's desire to pursue the tuners. It seems like the other media players do have at their roots programming that has been successfully packaged and marketed for sale, not to mention the incredibly lucrative military/industrial access to comsumers this "programming" affords.
I think there has been some recent effort to make and market a couple of Sirius "satellite" tuners that can pick up the Sirius broadcasting. However, now that Sirius plans to acquire the only other subscription-based FM provider, I suppose that Sirius willl pretty much lock up that format and quality will probably freeze or even roll back once they do it. Why should they care if there is no competition?
Of course we are quite used to buying a TT and then paying for records, or a CD player and then buying CDs, but so far FM has mostly been "free", apart from the endless commercials.
The idea of paying for TV or now radio is fairly new, but the cable and satellite have yet been around long enough to pre-condition the suckers for radio "content", too, and if and as this grows as they hope it will likely spawn various iterations of the average subscriber's idea of what constitutes an acceptable way to listen, just as HT has "evolved" to provide a vehicle/portal for "The Message" presented via TV.
My own idea is that something like Ovation TV would have better success selling "portals", because people generally are willing to pay more for something they can see, like HT versus hi-fi.
Of course, we know what the portals are for; but the avaerage guy just doesn't seem to worry about it, and this pay-on-pay system seems likely to be the main theme/path for "growth" in the modern "field of info-tainment".
Too bad San Diego FM mostly sucks, not to mention the reception nightmare that is most of Southern California.
If anyone knows anything about Sirius programming, sound quality, etc., please chime in. My wife gets satellite TV and I think it includes some Sirius stations. I have so far given it very little thought, despite the fact that I have always loved FM when it was worth listening to.
Best regards,
Paul SRerurn to Romy the Cat's Site