World Radio Tv Handbook 2002 [antikvár]

Editorial BBC BOMBSHELL In a year which has heralded many dramatic changes for the world of HF broadcasting, none has rocked the listening community as fundamentally as the decision by BBC World Service to abandon broadcasts to North America and Australasia from July 2001. For me, one measure of the magnitude of this move has got to be the request by George Jacobs - a US Presidential broadcast consultant and central player in HF broadcasting since before I was born - to address the subject in this edition. For a detailed, informative and balanced assessment of the BBCWS decision, 1 recommend his article; for my part I have no intention of duplicating his work in this editorial but instead I will confine my comments to the broader issues which are raised as a consequence. The BBC's motto, emblasoned across its coat of arms at Broadcasting House in London, reads Nation Shall Speak Peace unto Nation - although it is now quite clear that as far as the entirety of the English speaking world is concerned, the BBCWS will not be saying a word. This decision, I am sure readers will recall, comes hard on the heels of the demise of the entire German service last year. BBCWS initially pandered to complaints by providing an "alternative service' on the internet; these days, however, German is nowhere to be found. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that with a 'mere' 80 million German speakers, the plight of our European friends paled into insignificance given that the BBC must at the same time have been planning to pull the plug on 330 million North Americans and Australasians a few months later. FUNDAMENTALS Without a doubt the most fundamental objective for any broadcaster must be its audienc'e, and for time immemorial the formula for success has been a simple one: Content + Coverage = Audience. The concept is self-evident and successful broadcasters are in the business of maximising audience, hence if either the quality or coverage of a service diminishes, the audience inevitably declines too. It doesn't matter whether you are a tiny one-man operation or a global network with hundreds of highly skilled journalists and technicians. If you lose audience you fail as a broadcaster, and if you fail as a broadcaster, you will inevitably cease to exist. In my contacts with the BBC over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that those who produce programmes, research features and actually do the hands-on work necessary to create and maintain a successful station still remember, understand and implement the formula for success. Sadly the same is not true of upper management who seem to have entirely tost the plot, exhibiting a cavalier attitude to the fundamentals of this industry. Within that stratum, as I have warned in previous editorials, there has been a worrying fixation with the concept of media convergence, accompanied by a continuing failure to recognise that the formula for success applies to all media - converged or otherwise. IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE? It is clear to those whose vision is not blurred by corporate hyperbole, that the BBCWS decision has done great and possibly irreversible damage to an organisation which was once held in great esteem. Although the appearance of Radio Netherland on BBCWS frequencies could be seen as something of a gimmick, it does at least indicate that somebody considered the abandoned audience as being worthy of recognition and demonstrates that not all broadcasters are suffering from the same tunnel vision. The fact of the matter is that SW radio sales are buoyantly healthy in North America and elsewhere - yet none of them are going to be used to listen to the BBCWS. OTHER OPTIONS THE INTERNET As for an internet presence for the BBCWS there are a number of significant stumbling blocks, not the least of which is the question of accessibility. One vital question is that of server capacity. Will the BBC be able to support the many thousands of users logging in at normal times and can the intervening network support the load? And will there be the capacity to accommodate a several-orders-of-magnitude increase in traffic during international crises? As heavy research users of the internet at WRTH. it has been our experience that the World Wide Web fully lives up to its reputation of being the World Wide Wait. Real-world download speeds are often incapable of supporting anything approaching reliable streaming audio - dribbling audio would be a more realistic description. Furthermore this is not a local problem, during a recent visit to Los Angeles my experience was that data-transfer rates were at least as bad as those experienced here in the WRTH offices in Europe. The fact of the matter is that 'listeners' are not going to listen on the web unless the medium offers better quality, reliability and accessibility than the carrier which