Current PDF Edition - Broadcast Dialogue

Ramblings about radio –
past, present and ... future?
T
hirty-five years ago, a Dallas jingle company named TM Productions
wanted to promote a bunch of radio station jingle packages
that it had on offer. TM put out an LP (that’s an analogue longplaying
gramophone disc for you newbies) to every radio station in North
America, with samples of their jingles on Side B. But to catch everyone’s
attention, they created a radio play satire of the radio broadcasting business
of the future on Side A.
It was called Tomorrow Radio.
It was very creatively done and it was hilarious, especially for those of
us “in the know”. Tomorrow Radio described a preposterous future: stations
knew how many listeners they had from moment to moment, there
were a zillion specialty formats and all music was digitally retrieved from
a computer’s “memory banks” (Oops, so far it sounds pretty familiar).
Station employees lived in constant fear that their station was being
automated and one of the first tell-tale signs was the appearance at work
of a new coffee machine. The play covered the format change of a radio
station from K-9 Radio: for kids 9 and under, to Punk Country.
Anyway, if you’ve never heard of it, click HERE.
It’s still hilarious!
Many of the preposterous predictions have, of course, come true
though sometimes not exactly as forecast. This got me to thinking about
so many of the things that technology has made easier for us to do in
broadcasting and how some of those things have become passing fads.
Others are so common that we take them for granted.
Very philosophical, indeed!
I guess we need a couple of examples:
Remote broadcasting has been around almost as long as radio. All
those years of ordering telephone lines and of battling and lugging heavy
remote gear. During the 1980s, half of the Vancouver radio stations had
satellite remote trucks and drove them all over town doing regular broadcasts
from the great outdoors. Ironically, now that the combination of
cellular technology and high speed data transmission has made it possible
to do studio-grade radio broadcasting from virtually everywhere with no
notice and little money, we don’t see it used nearly as much as when it
was so much harder and more expensive to do.
Why is this?
Ironically, COFDM technology and microwave radios have now given
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by Dan Roach
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BROADCAST DIALOGUE—The Voice of Broadcasting in Canada • September 1, 2011 23