@cheeseweasel 521048 wrote:

Broadcast work is definitely something that interests me (and a lot of the corporate stuff I do does enter that territory, using Arquiva etc to link to sites in America), though I worry that there might not be much of an industry left by the time I’m in my mid-30s. A mate’s girlfriend narrowly missed the chop at Fremantle recently, who just laid off loads of staff – and they make all the crap reality shows that are popular at the moment. Apparently they don’t make as much through advertising revenue nowadays due to everyone watching online.

The tech side of the industry will still be around but its basically all merging with corporate telecoms/networking. its the production / creative side which is really being hammered due to the “content for free” expectations and also a seemingly endless supply of teenagers/youths willing to produce it for “free” (i.e being subsidised by rich parents).

(I will split these posts into the tech section)

I’ve berated a few folk on the Internet-Radio forum for claiming that volunteer positions on net stations are “jobs” (I think it may even be illegal to say that these days in the UK). At least with community radio stations they are 100% honest that at best the station manager gets a small salary (which works out to less than a corporate job with less hassle and substantial unpaid overtime is expected) and the rest of the presenters are volunteers.

But there really isn’t any difference between much modern broadcast engineering and conventional IT support these days. The ICR lot were surprised I was initially putting in a fair few hours of work for free, but I pointed out to them that I was also using them as guinea pigs for a new network infrastructure install at one of my day job sites, and as soon as I had seen the station up and running I was going to buy exactly the same routers, hubs and switches networking kit and deploy it at work (which I have since done).