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Settling For the Small Screen

March 3, 2008 | 1 Comment

Post to the Host:
I used to listen to your show here in Ireland on RTE Saturday nights at 7 p.m. and I was in despair when the show disappeared from Saturday evening and then I found it again on the Interweb. So thank you for being there again. Were you were aware of the darkness that came to Irish lives when your show disappeared from our Saturday evenings? How can we stop such senseless waste?

Michael S.
Dublin

What the RTC decided in their wisdom to dispense with was the one-hour abridged version of the show that is also heard in New Zealand and Australia, and what you hear on the Interweb — what we call the Internet, but never mind — is the full two-hour version, which I'm sure you've figured out by now. I had heard about RTE's decision, and of course I would never question a fellow broadcaster on that sort of thing. We live in an age of oversupply in radio, with some of the most interesting stuff to be found on the Interweb (Internet) and all of it easily accessible, and so broadcasters everywhere are facing the day, not so far off, when the Web/Net starts to swamp their boat.
Downloading audio will be so simple that even gizmo-challenged people like me will be doing it, and then what happens to the big studios and the tall radio towers? I don't know. A brave new world emerges from the old, and an old broadcaster like myself feels a twinge of regret.
It's like when the movie theater closed and we had to settle for the small screen.