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Just reading through the forum as I've just registered, and the thought occurred to me. Radio, the name, was descriptive. Nowadays the online radio stations are becoming more popular, but really they are streaming stations, not radio. I know they do the same job and that the name is inherited, but it's not really 'radio', is it?
Hi, A valid question. But since many of the real radio stations used to stream programs on the networks before. In this case is seems the difference is the method of delivery not what is delivered. The same goes ffor TV, what few stations actually transmit now get their stuff from the nets. They pretty much always did.
I think that the difference with TV though is that it is still broadcast-it goes over the airwaves still. Radio by definition is transmission wirelessly, through the airwaves. Streaming, online radio very much uses wires in it's transmission. The name has kind of just been grandfathered since it's the evolution of radio as it once was.
Technically, radio describes music that is being broadcast over radio waves, right? So I guess the streaming stuff that's being broadcast over the internet technically isn't radio... it's cable. Right? I mean, don't most of us access the internet via cable connections?
Other than the last chunk of it which most commonly is over WiFi, which is a form of radio. I guess that this is just a name that we're all so familiar with that it doesn't need changing.