Remediation

Now that I have a CD in my car, I've started using WireTap to record audio streams on my computer, burning them on CD so I can make use of drive time. (How much sports talk can anyone stand?)

This morning's feature was Samuel Becket, Your Ride Is Here, a radio play by J Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) .

The net could have interesting impact on radio theater. This is the dramatic genre where desktop television production is already here; you can put together a professionally-produced audio play without big financing. Everything is going this way; at Digital Storytelling, Bonifer said that the best way to sell a movie to a studio may be to go ahead and make it. On a shoestring. Do what you can, show it around; at that point, even studio executives will understand what you want to do. Then you get big money, hire stars, and make it again.

iTunes and the Apple Music Store change the terrain for radio drama yet again. The Straczynski drama is an audio stream, which is so 1999. It gets past the broadcast problem -- you can't broadcast things that specialized audience want -- but it's still tied to listening to the stream. What we want to do now, I think, is download the file and stick it in our iPod or burn it to a disc.

The big point here is that this is perfect for genre fiction and niche audiences -- like serious drama. Write the damn play. Meet some actors. Just do it. And the Music Store paradigm makes micropayments for this simple.