Mike O’Connor pinged me about an idea he had to build-out a low power FM radio station using RSS-based technologies.
I completely agree – and the idea gets me all giddy.
No only does it combine 3 of my favorite things: RSS, podcasts, and reaching a small community with simple technologies – it dovetails nicely into some renewed thinking on platform agnostic publishing.
Problem – Not enough programs to fill the day
Idea – Use podcasts (blogs with RSS feeds and audio programs) to aggregate content from a federation of LPFM stations. Garrick Van Buren built a great gizmo to do this and you can see an example of his system at PodcastMN. I’m sure Garrick would be happy to help with this.
Problem – Not enough volunteer hours to do the “program director” function for a single station
Idea – Share a program director between a federation of like-minded LPFM stations. Let the person be the aggregator of multiple feeds similar to the one Garrick does, and then create a feed that drives the daily programs on multiple stations. The stations could subscribe to this “network feed” and break away whenever they want to do local programming.
Now, it’s just a matter getting a LPFM construction permit from the FCC – unfortunately….
NOTICE: THE FCC IS NOT ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR NEW LPFM BROADCAST STATIONS AT THE PRESENT TIME.
Looks like 8 MN communities already received the green light.
As promising as LPFM sounds, with the FCC as its gatekeeper, I’m still betting 802.11 is the future of radio
Something tells me @MPR is a big part of the reason Minneapolis has not gotten any low power FM “green lights” as they curiously opposed the FCC licensing low power FM stations. That said – love the idea, I would love to share Ian Masters weekly must listen “Background Briefing” only available through kpfk.org with my neighborhood as a starting point. Using your system to syndicate podcasts gets really interesting…