Jack Chang (
It's a vision that's being built right now, and it's called PC-Radio. Chang outlined his plan at a recent gathering Taiwanese Internet industry executives, and to hear him talk, you'd think it had already happened.
"We're not an Internet company," said Chang, who is CEO of the Taipei-based PC-Radio Corp (優越傳信). "We see ourselves as a wireless IP company."
Owned by a consortium of seven Taiwan radio stations, including KISS FM and Philharmonic Radio Taipei (台北愛樂), PC-Radio has been working on its dream for a year already.
"As a radio operator, we saw this as our only opportunity to join the dotcom trend," he said.
The company, with five employees, is currently building out a series of four transmitters across central Taiwan in preparation for test broadcasts. An islandwide network will consist of around 20 transmitters at a total cost of NT$100 million. But that's only half of the equation. Chang is betting that PCs of the future will have an aerial and reception DSP (digital signal processing) chipset. With that little addition, at a cost of US$20, users will be able to receive PC-Radio's data broadcasts.
"I could broadcast anything," he said. "It could be CNN over IP, or TTV or anything."
PC-Radio, thanks to its parents' political connections, has already received islandwide licenses to broadcast at 213.36Mhz, which is channel 13 on VHF Band 3. That gives him a broadcast capacity of 1.25Mbps which can be split up any way necessary.
PC-Radio is the Taiwan radio industry's answer to Web-casting, the bandwidth-heavy method for radio stations and Net-only broadcasters to transmit to PC users' desktops. The problem with Web-casting is that it is not true broadcasting. Each extra user requires extra capacity whereas broadcasting has a fixed cost no matter how large the audience.
"The problem with the Internet is that when it was designed, nobody thought that maybe the Internet could be a mass communication device," Chang explained. Instead, the technology of the Internet is essentially point-to-point in nature. Each packet of data must have a final deliver address before it can be sent. With broadcasting, you send out the information and there's no looking back.
While true point-to-multipoint broadcasting is possible over fiber lines, such a change would require full-scale replacement of routers and servers. The easier alternative is wireless, with the only requirement being transmitters and inexpensive DSP receivers. In fact, the trend for wireless is software-based tuning where a single device can tune into any broadcast frequency, FM and AM radio, TV, cellphones or even satellites.
It's a trend that PC-Radio is relying on if it hopes to get anyone to tune in to its signal. Exactly what it will broadcast depends on its customers. "We're not at that stage yet," Chang conceded.
But the plan is to sign up educational institutions, such as English schools, who will pay PC-Radio to use its platform allowing them to broadcast lectures in real time to students' PCs. The current platform is unencrypted, which means anyone could tune in. As yet, the revenue model is hazy.
"The revenue would come from providing the platform, but we're currently subsidized by FM radio operations," Chang said.
But why would an English school pay to broadcast their lectures when non-paying students could tune in?
"The catch is, you don't air the whole lecture. You just tell them this is what you get if you come to us," Chang said.
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