The Future of RADIO - You are - Puget Sound RadioÂ®

We radio-types worry, analyze, and try to predict which technology will become the front-runner in how Radio is delivered.

Is AM dead? Will the HD infrastructure grow quick enough? Will royalty issues destroy Internet Radio? Is post-merger Satellite Radio the next big thing? What about content on Cell Phones?

Maybe this will matter in 10 years – but what about 50 or 75 years from now?

I’m going to give you my vision of the future of Radio based on where research is headed and how I imagine it might be applied. If nothing else, this article will give you something to think about.

You Are the Radio

Decades from now, we won’t be worried about carrying around radios, iPods, cell phones or any type of external device for receiving radio signals.

Thanks to nanotechnology, you will be your own radio receiver. Researchers are already experimenting towards this end. Last year, wired.com reported:

A scientist has unveiled a working radio built from carbon nanotubes that are only a few atoms across, or almost 1,000 times smaller than today's radio technology. The nanotech device is a demodulator, a simple circuit that decodes radio waves and turns them into audio signals. By hooking the decoder up to two metal wires, University of California at Irvine professor Peter Burke transmitted music via AM radio waves from an iPod to speakers across the room.
According to a recent article at dailymail.co.uk, "Children will learn by downloading information directly into their brains within 30 years, the head of Britain's top private schools organization predicted..."

Someday, you will have the option to purchase a "bio-telligent" implant which will quietly exist in your body until you decide to trigger it. When you do, this "nano-radio" will connect with your auditory system and be ready to receive content impulses which will be translated into sound that will play inside your head in the same way headphones create

Content Impulses
Content impulses - audio and video in its purest digital form - will be generic and usable by all nano-radio and nano-video implants.

We won't have digital files, hard drives, CDs, memory sticks, or any of the storage media we use today. Instead, all music, speech, and video that has ever been cataloged will be universally available at-once and from anywhere.

Everything that can be listened to or watched will be cataloged as content and requests for any of this from nano-radio implants will be known as content impulses.

Content impulses will be available via a worldwide wireless technology which permeates the globe and allows for extremely fast and accurate transmission.

By activating your nano-radio you will be able to choose anything ever recorded and stored: programming from the past, current programming or future scheduled events.

Not Really Radio But An Incredible Simulation

The idea of talk and/or information programming will exist, but you’ll choose by personality or subject, not by station. There will be little need for "stations" as we know them since content impulses will be ubiquitous.

All radio stations ever did were deliver programming to a select geographic area. Since the future will hold no geographic boundaries, the current system of geographic protection allocated by the F.C.C. license assignment scheme will no longer be necessary. As a matter of fact, the F.C.C. will no longer exist.

Once content impulses are requested and used by a person’s nano-radio, the impulse will leave behind a "memory" of being accessed which the nano-radio will be able to interpret and use for offering further suggestions of audio, should the a listener wish a continuous genre of music. Your nano-radio will learn what you like, an idea pioneered by the Music Genome Project and Pandora.

There will be no record companies. There will be no need to download music files from the Internet. There will be no royalty issues. Artists will sell their content directly to users.

Requests for music or audio with active copyrights will be noted by the system and artists will be compensated automatically based on a percentage formula that draws from a fund created and maintained by the users of nano-radio receivers.

Someday your children, or their children will acquire the ultimate control over their audio entertainment.

Marshal McLuhan was a Canadian scholar and philosopher who famously said, "The medium is the message." Our technology will one day make it possible to amend that statement by adding "The medium is the message…and you are now the medium."

source.. yahhf