Satellite Radio in Australia vs Podcasting

Mark Day, writing about satellite radio in The Australian, says:

THE World Audio Group boasts it has built a national commercial radio network for a fraction of the cost of conventional radio. This is true. It has racked up accumulated losses of $43million so far building a 50-station network, while DMG has paid nearly $500million to create its Nova network.

Maybe it won't be worth it. The radio industry is facing another techno threat - podcasting. This involves the automatic downloading of MP3 files to iPods or desktop computers.

Think of it as audio timeshifting, in the same way as video timeshifting is enabled by personal digital recorders of the type used by Foxtel's iQ system.

Tech blogger Doc Searls explains it thus: "Podcasting shifts our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and we give everybody else the chance to hearit."

Australian radio networks are watching podcasting blast off and trying to figure out how to get in on the act.

Read the full article .

These are HUGE numbers. When compared to these sorts of figures, our current capital raising should be a doddle. We are looking for a tiny fraction of that investment to build a global network.