WNTIRadio said:Nah, internet radio won't dominate and here's why:
1. Cost per listener. A radio station's cost whether 5,000,000, 5,000 or 5 people are listening is the same. The transmitter is on, and the signal is available in the coverage area. On the web, each listener costs a station in two things: Bandwidth and royalties. Each listener is, for the sake of example, 48kbps of bandwidth. Let's say you have a high rated morning show and have 450,000 people tuning in at the same time, that equates to almost 2.6GBps of data going out!!!!! Yikes!!!!
2. Cost TO the listener. Now that cellular providers are getting stingy with the mobile bandwidth, people aren't going to want to go over their plan and pay extra just to listen to something that already exists on their car radio.
3. Limited bandwidth. The cellular companies also have limited bandwidth in any given geographic area, due to the nature of RF. Let's say your high volume morning show (in listeners not loudness) plus every other station has each person waiting to go into the Lincoln Tunnel tuned in to a station and pulling down at minimum 48kbps. Good luck trying to make an actual phone call when that is going on. If the providers need to carry more bandwidth and put in more cell sites for support, then everyone's prices go up.
A point to point model is not cost effective for broadcasting. It's different where there can be fiber or a cable modem in every home, and there is adequate bandwidth (for now) to carry the traffic. With RF, there are only little slices of the spectrum to fit everything in and still manage to make all the services work.
The cost of bandwidth decreases every year. Wholesale bandwidth costs pennies per gigabyte now, and will decrease in the future. Eventually, unlimited data plans will win out, when 5G or 6G offers enough bandwidth that the cell companies won't be short of bandwidth.
I wasn't predicting about Internet radio now, I was predicting about it 10 years from now. Remember 10 years ago when most of us were on dialup, most stations didn't stream, we never even thought about the smartphone. Technology changes a lot in 10 years.