DIGITAL RADIO, as an evolving technology, has been around for over twenty years. Now, after much plotting, planning, tests and delays, it will start up in Australia in the middle of 2009. It comes with a joint promise: better audio quality and potentially more diversity of audio content. But since serious discussions about its introduction here first took place about fifteen years ago, the digital media world, and the audio aspects of it specifically, have changed dramatically. The internet has blossomed. MP3 players and other mobile digital devices have proliferated. Podcasts in their various forms are now commonplace. Our listening habits and options have shifted and multiplied. And digital radio in Britain has struggled. It is into this ever-mutating media environment, where much audio content has been decoupled from its broadcast origins or actually starts as a digital non-broadcast creation, that digital radio launches itself with all the high hopes of a new medium or a very old one with new credentials. But will it succeed? Will consumers buy a digital radio receiver? Why would they? How will broadcast radio in its digital form make its mark in the jungle of competing hybrids? Jock Given from the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology gives Peter Clarke an unvarnished look at the odds for this digital latecomer.
Has radio’s future passed?
Fifteen years after it was first proposed, digital radio is almost here. Has it come too late, asks Jock Given in this interview with Peter Clarke
Jock Given & Peter Clarke 5 May 2009 220 words
Share
Share
Share
Jock Given & Peter Clarke
Peter Clarke is a Melbourne based broadcaster, writer and educator. He pioneered national talkback on Australian radio as the inaugural presenter of Offspring (now Life Matters) on ABC Radio National. Podcast theme created by Ivan Clarke, Pang Productions.
Topics: internet | Jock Given | media | Peter Clarke | podcast | radio
Related Articles
Essays & Reportage
Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion
Murray Goot
12 March 2024
Is the Australian’s polling and commentary doing the opposition any favours?
National Affairs
How’s he travelling?
Peter Brent
22 February 2024
It depends on how you ask the question
Books & Arts
We’re not at war. We’re at work
Matthew Ricketson
14 February 2024
Former Washington Post editor Martin Baron reflects on Trump, Bezos and the challenges of journalism
Correspondents
Lost in the post
Peter Mares
12 February 2024
Britain’s Post Office scandal, kept alive by dogged journalism and a new drama series, still has a long way to run