That is to say, after a 50 plus-year reign of supremacy, has broadcast media begun to slide down a slippery slope to be consigned to history with the telegraph and Morse code? More and more evidence seems to be mounting that broadcast is facing troubled times. First, the market was segmented when cable came of age. The “Big three” were suddenly faced with actual competition and they lost significant numbers of eyeballs. This didn’t do a lot for programming initially, the song “500 Channels and Nothing on” sort of summed up the early cable landscape (with the possible exception of MTV, in the early days). But eventually, the industry found its footing and went the way of the magazine industry with channels dedicated to niche markets—think the History Channel for old men, the Food Network for people who like to eat, the Travel Channel for people who want to see the world without leaving their house, and Animal Planet for people who can sit through six hours of Ron Reagan commentating the riveting action of a dog show.

And while radio has always been a bit of a wild-west environment, the world reacted to the homogenization of content with satellite radio and our friends (soon to be friend) XM and Sirius (maybe Xirius, quick run out and register that URL). Once again we have channels that are designed to appeal to a much narrower demographic based on the inescapable logic that there may not be enough of an audience to make a radio station devoted entirely to the delta blues genre in any one metropolitan area, but if you take all of the people from all of the metropolitan areas in the country and add in the smattering of people in between those places, suddenly you have a potential audience that rivals the legions of Britney Spears fans that used to exist. And Clear Channel had to go running to a judge to make sure its leveraged buyout isn’t plagued by nit picky questions from a lot of bean counting bankers.

So, we see the broadcast universe moving to a model of medium-casting, with content appealing on different channels to smaller groups of people. But where do we go from here? (more…)

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