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Chapter 8: Beyond the Terrestrial?: Networked Distribution, Multimodal Media, and the Place of the Local in Satellite Radio
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8 @ Beyond the Terrestrial? Networked Distribution, Multimodal Media, and the Place of the Local in Satellite Radio alexander russo and bill kirkpatrick For most people in the United States, “satellite radio,” means direct broadcast satellite radio—Sirius and XM, which merged in 2008. These are relatively new players in the broadcasting world, beginning to beam their programming only at the start of the twenty-first century. Surrounding this form of satellite radio are discourses of newness and difference from “terrestrial radio”—new technologies, new choices, new possibilities for niche programming, and new business models. “Radio has been stuck in an engineering time warp for two generations,” wrote Mike Langberg in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “[and] not much has changed since the introduction of FM about forty years ago.” But now satellites are ushering in a “space-age radio revolution.”1 Such rhetoric is misleading. Although satellite broadcasting may be colloquially thought of as a new technology, a perception encouraged by the “satcasters” themselves, such a notion elides a much longer relationship between U.S. radio and satellite technologies. Indeed, the rhetoric of the revolutionary “newness” of satellite radio, which conceives of satellite radio in opposition to long-established practices of terrestrial radio, silences the many ways in which satellite has a long and important role in American broadcasting, and masks a number of contradictions within radio practice today. This chapter seeks to reclaim satellite radio’s history to attend to the ways it acts in conjunction with terrestrial radio as a multimodal distribution technology profoundly affecting what listeners have been hearing for decades. This focus on the relationship between distribution and content follows Lisa Parks’s recent challenge to the fields of television and media studies to examine the impact of distribution technologies. She suggests, “if television technology is a historically shifting form and set of practices, then it is necessary to consider more carefully how the medium’s content and form change with different distribution systems.”2 The same is true of post1950s radio, the histories of which have largely conceived of the medium in terms of the station and its local audience, despite the fact that this narrative omits how and why certain kinds of program content reached the station . Satellite radio is one such system, consisting of a hybrid of distribution technologies: traditional terrestrial station-to-receiver broadcasts as well as the systems required for stations to obtain the programming and commercials they then rebroadcast. In its initial iterations, satellite radio was conceived as a means for two-way program exchanges as well as unidirectional program distribution. A policy context of deregulation and the acceleration of radio formats contributed to the dominance of the latter model in the 1980s and into the 1990s, when satellites were used to syndicate programs to revived radio networks. More recently, personal satellite receivers and program providers like XM and Sirius have emerged, operating in ways that are both in opposition to and in accordance with long-standing norms of terrestrial radio. A historically informed look at the role of satellites in U.S. radio reveals that satellite technology has been central to “terrestrial” radio for decades, participating in major industrial shifts since the 1970s. These shifts include the proliferation of national networks, the increasing centralization and automation of programming, the intensification of audience segmentation, and an ongoing crisis in the supposed ontological qualities of “good” radio, namely “liveness” and localism. In this sense, the satellite radio of Sirius XM does not represent a strong break with terrestrial broadcasting—a “revolution ” as popular imagination and marketing discourses would have it—but rather a continuation of long-standing trends and tensions in radio practice. This perspective also reveals how personal digital satellite radio’s replication of the dynamics of terrestrial radio has made it particularly vulnerable to competition from the technologies of media convergence and helps account for its tenuous future. Satellites and Radio Broadcasting: Multimodal Media Although the first commercial telecommunications satellites went into orbit in 1962, satellites were not regularly used for program distribution in the United States until the 1970s. Western Union’s launch of Westar I in 1974 provided new possibilities for distribution but was at first largely limited to television networks. Less discussed was interest in satellite distribution by radio news networks, which at the time delivered their national programming primarily over AT&T’s landlines. Although some of these companies bore the beyond the terrestrial? 157 [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:00 GMT) names of iconic...