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welp, it's all about content. people can deal with ads, and the pay-per-listen stations will have 'em anyway.

Sirius is doomed, having sold its soul to Howard Stern. And who is going to pay for Oprah?

I'm already noticing how stultifying the canned stuff on my iPod Shuffle is getting...I long for the spontaneity of live radio broadcast...is there such a think anymore?

welp, it's all about content. people can deal with ads, and the pay-per-listen stations will have 'em anyway.

Sirius is doomed, having sold its soul to Howard Stern. And who is going to pay for Oprah?

I'm already noticing how stultifying the canned stuff on my iPod Shuffle is getting...I long for the spontaneity of live radio broadcast...is there such a thing anymore?

Sounds a lot like the conservative blogospher, doesn’t it?

lol. Yep. I sure do love freedom! :)

Don't knock it! I was part of that "must carry-must go!" movement. I wanted to be able to pick my channels. Little by little, that is happening. The Invisible Hand works! :) Sometimes, it takes time.

I enjoyed your well thought-out vanity, grey_whiskers. Thank you for pinging me to it.

I've been checking out some of my old news MSM haunts.. they've all got internet forum "discussion" groups going on. 'Bout time!

Hey, thanks for the link to here. Good points, all.

By way of further analogy (of course, you may have mentioned it, because I didn't read every bit of your initial post) FM radio started out as a toe in the water for AM station owners (or at least, very often), and AM is now sports/racing broadcasts and talk. Talk has also been moving into FM for some years. There is more content and types of content in radio than there is on TV.

TV content has been on the decline for years, both in the kind of garbage seen on the teen channels (BET, MTV, etc), and the numbers of idiotic and increasingly vulgar cartoons (for the chronologically adult, cognitively child audiences), not to mention the unreality TV shows like Survivor. And yet, people still pay pretty big bucks for sat and cable. I dropped cable in, hmm, probably 1999, and haven't much missed it. I doubt I'd ever go back to paying for it.

If cable (old fashioned kind; I loathe digital cable and satellite TV systems) were a la carte, so that I could pay just for the channels I want, I'd probably re-up. Advantages to that approach include, eliminating the intelligence vacuum channels like MTV (important for parents) and also very good feedback to cable providers as to what actually sells. I'd want the local stations, plus Discover, History Channel, and maybe that's it.

That would give the consumer the kind of customization desired and create a much more responsive system, guaranteeing worthwhile content rather than a competition to see which provider can stuff the most worthless stations into the bandwidth.