Streaming technologies are bypassing old-school radio

Other than in a vehicle, does anyone still listen to traditional over-the-air (OTA) radio, whether AM or FM?

Of course, the answer is still “yes,” but one has to wonder for how much longer. 

Why? Well, one answer is that, rather quietly, streaming radio has become a major player.

Most telling for me was when local radio station CKNW began running promotional pieces for iHeartRadio. Why, I wondered, would CKNW, part of the financially struggling Corus Entertainment business controlled by the Shaw family, bill itself as being part of an American media conglomerate, albeit only for streaming purposes?

Streaming for radio stations has been around for at least 20 years. I ran a very simple streaming station of my own in the late 1990s. However, with low bandwidths in those days, it was a significant effort. Besides, it was only doable because of the likes of Napster, which essentially, for a time, made music a public domain commodity.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and streaming is ubiquitous. Audio and video streams are part of modern daily life. Whether it is through one or more of the many TV streaming platforms, a major audio streaming service, a podcast of community news, or through a streamed event being covered on YouTube, it is difficult to imagine going back to life without such technologies.

For me, radio has always been something you received over the air. As a child, I built antennas to pull in signals from pirate radio stations anchored just beyond the territorial limit of the country where I grew up. I then extended my antennas to pull in shortwave stations from around the world. Radio, to me, was magical.

Another fast-forward to today: shortwave radio has largely disappeared. A few countries still run national shortwave services, and shortwave still has some importance for Pacific islands and parts of Asia, but for all practical purposes, it is yesterday’s technology.

There’s not a day I don’t listen to a radio. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, and any time I’m in the car. Before going into details, I should add that car listening is mostly to SiriusXM channels—it’s still radio, albeit from a cluster of satellites, and it requires a yearly battle to get a reasonable monthly subscription rate.

When I first began listening to radio in North America after moving here from the southern hemisphere, it was possible with a basic radio to hear stations as far away as New Orleans, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and powerhouse stations such as KGO and KFBK in California. This has become increasingly difficult due to interference and noise from a host of modern technologies, from Wi-Fi to LED lighting.

This is what finally led me to listen to streaming radio, through my phone, with a variety of apps, some of which we’ve explored in this space previously (TuneIn Radio, Radio Garden come to mind). It became increasingly difficult to listen reliably to a favourite radio program over KFBK. This station, like local station CKNW, uses the iHeart application.

iHeart seems to have figured out how to run targeted advertising for users when they select one of the literally hundreds of thousands of radio stations and audio podcasts they have ready to stream. Although the streaming radio space is now fragmented (some stations on iHeart, some on TuneIn, others still bravely going it alone), iHeart may have the deep pockets to eventually pull off an all-in-one platform solution.

Until recently, CKNW streamed through a made-in-Canada solution, the Radioplayer Canada app; this has now begun to fade away. Radioplayer has not put out a press release since 2017. There’s a bit of a delicate dance when radio stations move to a platform such as iHeart’s. CKNW has faced problems with its streaming connections. Don’t bother phoning to report a problem; no one answers the switchboard at CKNW, or at Global News, which runs the website for CKNW. On the day of the Canadian prime minister’s resignation announcement, I couldn’t connect to the stream. I ended up instead connecting to NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto. I haven’t looked back. Terrific station!

That’s how it is with a streaming platform. All stations have equally strong signals; one sounds as good as another. It’s the programming that hooks a listener. I now have a handful of streaming stations I switch amongst. Local station CKNW led me to the platform; the platform led me to other stations. The local station lost me because of technical issues, but also because of excessive infomercial programming and a monotonous overnight “History of Music” podcast, which appears to have no end and must have been recorded years ago as the host refers to users being able to contact him through a Google+ page—Google+ disappeared back in 2019.

On an upbeat note, as I write this last paragraph, I am listening to Vancouver FM station 104.3, The Breeze, on a tabletop radio—a fine Grundig from yesteryear. Perhaps there is still some life left in real OTA radio after all.

Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).

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