Overview

How have established terrestrial radio broadcasters responded to the arrival of the Web as an additional means of distribution? A very large number of them have decided that they should give it a try in one form or another. We may see this as partly professional curiosity: Does this medium have anything new to offer the broadcaster? But there is also the sense in which stations fear they cannot afford not to register their presence there, at least once they see a competitor station has decided to experiment. So radio stations the world over have begun to incorporate the Web into their strategies, before perhaps being sure precisely what they hope to achieve by doing so. The deciding factor is that it costs very little to get going on the Web (in professional broadcasters terms): no additional licensing is necessary (though see Chapter 8 on copyright), the programme output is already paid for, so what is there to lose when it may be possible to add audience in this way?

We can categorize five levels of involvement in web radio by broadcasters:

1. The station website.

2. The simulcast stream of the terrestrial output.

3. Archive streams of parts of the terrestrial output.

4. Investment in creating additional side channels of new programming which target niches within and to the side of the broadcast audience.

5. Using broadcast expertise to create content for third party streaming sites.

Most radio stations now have their own website. A proportion now also simulcast and of those...