I was just sorting through my old copies of MacUser today (and by sort I mean "sit and read"), when I cam across a story about how the BBC are planning to build a DAB digital radio add-on for the iPod. Neat! 
Except it kind of isn't. Honestly, who cares about broadcast radio anymore? I can't honestly remember the last time I listened to broadcast radio. My parents watch more broadcast TV and listen to more broadcast radio than I do. I've got four and a half hours of unwatched videos sitting in iTunes, and over 100 hours of unlistened audio podcasts. (There's about a 50-50 split in there between 'professionals' - BBC, NPR, commercial - and 'amateur' podcasters)
Where I live we get only two terrestrial television stations (BBC One and ITV). We do not get digital 'DAB' or Freeview. We don't get mobile phone signals either. And, no, I'm not out in the middle of nowhere. We have trains to London every half hour and it takes about an hour to get to Charing Cross. As the crow flies, we're about fifty miles from London and yet we don't get virtually any of the radio signals.
We live at the bottom of a hill though.
Does it matter? No. The Internet has pretty much replaced any need for it. Podcasting, peer-to-peer and so on make it all irrelevant. By the time that the BBC has implemented it's future strategy, the only people who will actually use any of the technology will be the over sixties. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but us young'uns will get everything off the Internet.
We won't use "iPlayers" either. What is the point?
I'm sorry to the guys and gals at the BBC, but, like the rest of the broadcasting world, you've been routed around by the Internet. The UKNova guys are the pirate radio DJs of the twenty-first century while the iPlayer is the tame crap that they played on domestic radio. It's against the law, but everyone will be tuning into Radio Torrentmania for a little while longer.
