How ’bout some radio on TV?

By Todd Mundt • March 22, 2007

And I’m not talking about “This American Life.”

Great thoughts in the past few weeks on the TV digital multicast front: first, from David Liroff and second from Dennis Haarsager.

Why can’t our fat digital TV pipelines serve as a portal for all public media? If I’m a statewide PTV network, why couldn’t I reserve bandwidth for the audio streams of all the public radio stations in my state? Setting aside the rights issues for now, what would the bandwidth be for that? Very little.

Yes, it’s not an entirely portable portal, so to speak; but I’ve been known to listen to radio at home. That HD-capable USB receiver you’re thinking about buying for your desktop (or laptop) could pick it up.

Would anyone use it? I’m not sure, but it’s probably so cheap that it’s worth trying. And you gotta admit, it’s at least as compelling as another rerun of “New Scandinavian Cooking” on Create or a near-useless 24 hour HD channel.

Categories: publicmedia
Tags: hdtv

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Dennis Haarsager 1 year ago 1 point
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Thanks for the link to my post. We've talked here (talk is cheap) about using some of our DTV spectrum for a Northwest Public Radio surround sound channel on our two television stations with album covers or a regional Flickr feed as "video." Last I checked over a year ago, there were over 2,000 music DVDs in surround (none of them in our inventory). PSIP will support it and many of the people buying large screen televisions have home theater systems, available for as little as $350 at Costco. However, the crush of other projects and the expanding costs (and this was before the current copyright billing debacle) caused us to put it on the back burner. This seems very doable, so let's see you Iowans get'erdone. But be sure it's just locally recorded music. --Dennis

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cre8tivefriends 1 year ago 1 point
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People pay for audio stations on their digital cable - genras of music, mostly. My friend used to put a towel over the TV when playing it, though. The blank screen with just plain type on it was annoying to her.

Perhaps there could be a little mp3-type gadget you could tune in on, instead of thru TV set itself. Portability is a big draw these days!

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