Chatting with any senior radio operator and the topic soon comes around to where the industry is heading in an age when a broadcast licence no longer comes with an app that prints money. If anyone has a clue as to where it might all end up, it’s Austereo CEO Guy Dobson who told us, “Without giving too much of our strategy away, in terms of re-inventing the wheel, we want to be three minutes ahead, not three years. If we got it wrong and we’ve travelled down a path it’s a lot easier to unwind if we haven’t gone too far.”

Perhaps that’s advice that the likes of World Audio and thebasement.com.au could have used before they embarked on their heroic pioneering adventures into the world of cyberpace. In hindsight, they weren’t necessarily on the wrong path, just a few years (at least three) too early. But whether they misjudged or mistimed the market, their fate was the same. They ran out of money before the public caught up with the future.

There’s little chance of that happening to Austereo, or indeed any of the incumbent networks, with advertising expenditure tipped to rise by up to 25% in the coming year.

Nonethelss, Dobson agrees that things are far more complex now than when it was all terrestrial. “There are other pipes that plug in to radio now whether its digital, mobile, online or what have you. We have to look at all of those and how we plug them into the main game and make money out of it all.

“There’s been a lot, a lot of work structurally at Austereo going into to how we operate as a business which is why we look at ourselves now as an entertainment solutions company as opposed to just a pure radio company. That is our absolute strength,” says Dobson.

The question is, will Guy Dobson’s foresight look better or worse with hindsight? What do you think?