Broadcasting System

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 20, 28 November 1930, Page 8

Broadcasting System

Defined by Sir

John

Reith

TN view of the Postmaster-Generij’s recent pronouncement that the Broadcasting Company’s license, which expires in January, 1932, will not be renewed, and that the Government will take over the engineering control of broadcasting, the following extract from an article on "Broadcasting," written for the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica by Sir John Reith, director-General of the British Broadcasting Company, should prove of interest to all wireless listeners :- In his article, Sir John refers to the following systems :-* (a) ‘Goodwill commercial broadcasting tempered by Government control, as in the United States since 1927; (b) Systems constituted as commercial companies, bus , subjected to the continuing super= vision of a Government department, and limited as to profits; (¢c) companies commercial in form, in which the Government holds a controlling interest, as in Germany, Austria, CzechoSlovakia; and (d) organisations of the type of the British Broadcasting Corporation or the Danish Radio Council, in which a national broadcasting authority is constituted by, but stands apart from, the ordinary machinery of the State. "The success of an organisation of the last type," states Sir John, inter alia, "depends essentially upon the public according to its executives and its traditions-a confidence that is independent of its political outlook toward the Government of the day; hence it has usually been instituted as the result of prior experience, successful or unsuccessful, of other forms, and not at the outset. ...In some countries the engineering side of the whrk is wholly in the hands of the State telegraph authority, and the broadcasting organisation as a distinct body is limited to the provision and execution of programmes, In others,’ the engineer service is as much a part of the broadcasting organisation as are the programme and the administrative departments. "That the question is not a simple one may be gauged from the fact that of the two most highly-developed sere vices in Europe, the one works under the first and the other under the second system. In the British view there. are many factors, such as engineer in terest in the details of studio acoustics and managements on the one hand, and artistic interest in the control of modulation on the other, that makes it undesirable for any hard and fast . line to be drawn between the two sides of the work."