BY RON SMITH
In the mid 90s, I acted as sort of an Internet "evangelist," explaining this thing called "The 'Net" to business and civic groups and trying to prognosticate to where it was heading. We knew the Internet was hot, but was it a fad like CB radios, or was it the "next thing" like color television?

I remember boldly predicting that by the year 2000 there would be two kinds of companies -- those on the Internet and those out of business. Okay, I may have overstated the case. But today, the lack of a Web presence surely is not the sign of a progressive concern (does the name Montgomery Ward come to mind?).

Now, instead of peering into the future, I'd like to look to the past at the darker days of other media.

It's the early 1950's. Kurt Hanson's grandfather sits at his mimeograph machine and begins to run off the latest issue of RATS -- Radio And Television Survey. This new medium of television has many drawbacks, it says. TVs are bulky, though screens are small. It takes a great deal of time and effort to set the antenna right to achieve even a snow-filled picture. And those pictures are black-and-white with monaural sound -- nowhere near the glorious Technicolor with wraparound sound you get at the local movie palace.

Television advertisers are so few that one sponsor buys an entire show. Five times an hour one hears "you can trust your car to the man who wears the star." The programming consists primarily of recycled radio plots. There are those like Burr Tillstrom and Dave Garroway who are pushing the envelope, but their efforts, like most of television, have yet to achieve great financial success.

Of course we know that sets become smaller, even portable. Color, stereo sound and high-definition pictures arrive and the Super Bowl becomes bloated with dot-coms buying ads at extravagant rates.

It's now the early 1980s. Kurt Hanson's father is at the Quik-E-Print with the latest issue of RARE -- Radio And Radio Exchange. This issue looks at the troubles of FM radio. Despite having been around for over 25 years, most have yet to make a profit. The majority of FM stations stopped simulcasting their AM counterparts in the late 60s. And music formats swarmed to the FM band for greater fidelity and stereo sound in the 70s.

FM listenership equaled AM in most cities by the late 70s. Yet FM is still viewed as the "ugly stepsister" of AM by many advertisers loyal to the AM mainstays that have been around for 50 years. The NBC radio group mandates to its FM stations (all five -- yes, Mel and Lowry, it was possible to run a successful chain in the days before deregulation) that they will be profitable in the next year or else.

Surprisingly, they are. And most don't look back. In 1984, Plough Broadcasting sells WJJD-AM/WJEZ-FM in Chicago to Infinity Broadcasting for $14 million. Based largely on the success of the FM (now known as WJMK) they recoup the expense in nine months.

It's the early 2000s again. $14 million probably doesn't pay a month's salary for Mel now. The whole point of this nostalgic exercise, however, is to reinforce that no medium has ever been an instant success. And Internet Radio is no exception. When shortsighted groups refuse to stream their stations because there's no immediate profit, I wonder whether they said that about television and FM radio in the past (before they worshipped at the altar of the Wall Street analyst).

A radio General Manager once asked me, "What's the return on my being on the 'Net?" I asked him, "What's the return on those billboards you put up along the highway?" The billboards promote the station, which hopefully gets it more listeners. The Internet, likewise, promotes the station but is also a medium by which you can acquire more listeners in areas like offices where your signal would not otherwise penetrate. ROI is about more than just dollars.

I read someone state once that, if you do the math, the infrastructure of the 'Net can't support most people using it to listen to radio. True enough. But there was a time that radio's infrastructure couldn't support sending a program to the whole nation at once. So programs were broadcast twice, once for each coast.

The Net is often spoken of as a "field of dreams" -- if you build it they will come." That's backwards. If they come, it will get built. Increased bandwidth, satellites, cloud-edge technology and increasingly more efficient compression techniques will all make better quality sound travel more efficiently over the 'Net in the coming years. ClickRadio has pioneered storing music files on users' hard drives, making even portability possible (I know one "road warrior" who installed ClickRadio on his laptop just so he could listen to music on long plane flights).

It's unfortunate that with the dot-com economy going bust, a lot of pioneers that might have pushed its envelope are now gone. Advertisers have shown a reluctance to buy time on this fledgling medium. Venture capitalists have retreated into their shells. A lot of good business models have vanished, the result of not enough time to prove their worth. We have not only thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but also the cat, the dog, and Aunt Martha.

I still believe in Internet Radio. If terrestrial stations won't embrace this medium and make it theirs, then others will. The concept is too good and potentially profitable to be ignored simply because others have tried and failed.

What will make it a success? Three things will help:

1) A Unique Selling Proposition. Internet radio needs the equivalent of an Uncle Miltie on TV, an Alan Freed on radio, or those uncut movies on HBO to sell itself to listeners.

2) Knowledgeable programmers. Most listeners think they can program a station better than radio professionals can. On the Internet, many non-radio people got their chance. We have heard the results and we are not amused. One major Internet radio concern, still in business, programs all of its hundreds of channels with 90 songs each -- 30 in category "A", 30 in "B" and 30 in "C". There are no deviations. I am thankful I was never involved with them. "Personalized Radio" is a potential unique selling proposition that is being ruined because there is no one with experience in programming to guide the software into presenting listeners' choices properly. Technology will always be cold and lifeless without human guidance.

3) Advertisers who think out of the box. An ad on Internet radio is not the same as one on terrestrial radio. For one, it's visual, reinforcing the audio message. Two, it's interactive -- and that can be more than just allowing listeners to click on the visual to go to a Web site with more information and marketing. Three, it's targeted. Yes, the audience is too small (now) to target by demographics. But for many advertisers, the mere fact that someone is listening to radio with their computer defines them as part of a desirable segment of the population. Scattershot CPM buying is not the way to go on the 'Net.

Even with these three things, there are still technical problems to overcome. But I just spent the last three years working with some of the best and brightest engineers and programmers, and I don't think there's a problem they can't solve given the right guidance and resources.

There are times when it seems like, contrary to what Mick Jagger sings, time is not on our side. But history is. And that should make all the difference.

Ron Smith is the former Senior Music Programmer and Broadcast Operations Manager for RadioWave.com in Chicago (until the last round of cutbacks). He was also the Music Director for Oldies 104.3 in Chicago. He can be reached at ronsmith@interaccess.com.

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From CNet News.com: "One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs (liquid crystal display), Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a monochrome display of the same size. Larger displays for notebook PCs are also in Toshiba's plans.

"Organic light-emitting diode displays -- also known as organic electroluminescent displays -- are considered the successor to LCDs because they can provide brighter images at a lower cost. 'In the long run, OLEDs could be less expensive, brighter, thinner and play video better than LCDs,' DisplaySearch analyst Barry Young said.

"When mass-produced, the organic displays will cost about 20 percent less than LCDs because the manufacturing process is more streamlined. The next-generation displays use fewer materials and require fewer manufacturing steps than LCDs, Young said."

Read the entire story here.

...

... We included this piece because some RAIN readers had suggested that it is the cost of producing LCD displays that has kept Internet appliances from being successfully marketed. The struggles of the appliance industry have been exemplified by 3Com's Kerbango (the demise of which was reported in RAIN here) and Audrey; and the delays involving Sony's eVilla (in RAIN here). ...

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From CNet News.com: "The online streaming-media company has been written off numerous times in its longstanding battle with Microsoft for market share. Its stock tumbled nearly 20 percent to $10.62 a share Tuesday on speculation that AOL Time Warner's America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider, is poised to dump an exclusive deal with the company and open the door for Microsoft to replace RealNetworks' technology as media player of choice for some 29 million subscribers...

"Analysts agreed that AOL is unlikely to dump RealNetworks any time soon. But some also acknowledged that there are signs that it may be more receptive to increasing support for Microsoft streaming technology as it seeks to renew a key codistribution deal within Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system."

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June 14-16, 2001	R&R Convention 2001: Los Angeles, CA
June 20-22, 2001	Streaming Media West 2001: Long Beach, CA
July 19-22, 2001	The Conclave Learning Conference: Minneapolis
Sept. 5-7, 2001	XStream: Broadcasting on the Internet at the NAB Radio Show: New Orleans, LA