Is BROADcasting still alive?

When I started in the business 40+ years ago, it was called BROADcasting. Then a few years ago with the media explosion on cable and satellite and Internet many in the business (channels, sites, even networks such as CNBC) became NARROWcasters and NARROWcasting was the trend. Now is it MICROcasting because the pie has been cut up into so many, many slices? And to succeed now you must have the best damn piece of microcasting pie? And to try to broadcast to reach all will not satisfy the news taste buds of anyone?

There's another change coming to "broadcasting" and that is that over the air broadcasting might be ending. Instead of TV stations broadcasting their signals via towers and over the air, the future could be TV going out via the Internet to homes and even to smart phone connections.

The "message" will still be going out, but instead of with towers it will be through a digital signal.

I think the niche-casting contributed to an overall trend of people in the general population seeking their own micro-niches in general. This is one reason we have such lack of civility in politics. People simply don't interact and conduct civil discourse with people outside their micro-loop of like-minded people.

That's a very interesting idea you raised, redietz. Are you saying that all of the niche-casting has created more isolation than communication which can lead to sharing of ideas?

Yes -- while we interact with more people numbers-wise, we interact with fewer different opinions and fewer different behaviors. We isolate ourselves in terms of ideas and opinions.