Overview

Having considered the technical, legal and ethical considerations thrown up by web radio, I move on in the next two chapters to look at their implications for what we can hear on web radio: the nature of the content of programmes; the organization of programmes into schedules; and the part the audience plays in this dynamic. This book has shown already, I think, that web radio is something other than merely another distribution mechanism for radio. Yes, we can hear the same programmes through both terrestrial and Internet receivers, but web radio also allows us to tune in to a great quantity of other listening if we want it. But what precisely does or can the programme maker do to create web offerings that are different to terrestrial radio? I am returning then to the two questions posed early in Chapter 1: What new strengths does web radio add to pre- Internet radio? and What established strengths of radio does web radio supplant?

We know from the history of radio that questions of what to put into a programme, how to schedule it in relation to others and how both communicate with a listening audience or not are all intimately intertwined. As Hendy (2000) points out in his introduction to Radio in the Global Age:

No one aspect of radio can be fully understood without some reference to three interrelated aspects of the medium: first, the ways in which it is produced, secondly the form and...