   
|
||
 March 15, 2005 The Big Broadcast of 2005 Okay, even I’m too young to have a direct memory of the film referenced in the above title. But I grew up within range of a TV station that regularly ran old movies late at night, including a 1932 outing called The Big Broadcast, which was followed by similarly titled features in 1936, 1937, and 1938. These films were vehicles designed to give faces to the stars people heard every week on the radio, and celebrated the tying together of North America by the national networks. Via radio broadcasts, listeners could for the first time simultaneously enjoy Jack Benny, or Burns and Allen, or Bob Hope, whether they lived in San Francisco or Boston or Montreal.But apart from such blockbuster programs, radio -- and, later, television -- was organized mostly on a local basis. Sure, CBS and NBC (and, in Canada, the CBC) joined the stations together for a few hours a day, but most stations carried local material that projected strong senses of community. Fifty years ago (I do remember this), much of radio resembled what we hear over the airwaves today. And once television killed network radio, the medium became even more locally focused, at least in the US. That was in distinct contrast to what was happening in most of the rest of the world, where broadcasting was organized mostly on a national basis and usually run by the government. In Britain, for instance, it didn’t really matter where you were -- what was on the radio was the same everywhere. North American television began pretty much the same way, with local affiliates tapping into national network broadcasts a few hours a day and doing their own thing the rest of the time. It was interesting to travel to distant cities to see what was playing there. You could always count on finding Dallas, but in non-prime-time hours the diversity was considerable. In recent years there has been a noticeable homogenization of television in North America, though in some ways this has played itself out differently in Canada and the US. In Canada there are now basically four national English-language television services, which tend to program on regional rather than local bases. The government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which started out with a handful of company-owned stations and many local affiliates, has been carrying out a program of replacing the privately owned stations with repeater transmitters, each fed with programming from a regional CBC production center. In most cases, that means all the stations in a province receive pretty much the same signal, which differs from others in the same time zone only in its daily newscasts and some commercials. There are still some remaining affiliates, but it doesn’t take a lot of prescience to see these being absorbed in the near future, if the CBC can manage it. Canada’s biggest private television service is CTV, originally a number of separately owned stations joined by a cooperatively owned network. The Toronto station has gradually bought up all but three of those outlets, and now runs them largely on regional rather than local bases. Global, the third service, has always owned its outlets, though it’s only recently become truly national. And almost all the outlets not owned by the CBC, CTV, or Global are now the property of the new kid on the block, CHUM Television. This sort of concentration is not a part of the US television scene -- yet. But the local over-the-air industry has been severely eroded by specialty cable channels, which function as national networks with barely any local content. Until recently, this sort of delocalizing didn’t affect radio (except, in Canada, the CBC). Even the brave new world of digital radio was supposed to be organized on the same community basis as its analog predecessor, although it was to be implemented very differently in the two countries: In the US, broadcasters are anxious to piggyback digital signals on their existing analog carriers; in Canada, an entire separate, digital-only band has been set aside, with a new digital channel for each existing analog station. No one in either country has been pushing this new technology very hard, however. What has taken its place in the US is satellite digital radio from XM and Sirius. Together they already have a couple of million subscribers, who are able to receive the multiplicity of channels each offers wherever they travel. So far, neither service is officially available north of the border (although there are reportedly lots of gray-market receivers, just as there are for satellite TV), but hearings are under way to license at least one -- and perhaps as many as three -- satellite radio services in Canada. It’s not too farfetched to imagine that these continent-wide services will put a huge dent in local radio, and maybe even force it off the dial altogether in the not too distant future. ...Ian G. Masters
|
||
|
