The most interesting thing happening in African radio right now is not a new station launch or a viral podcast or a celebrity presenter moving to a competitor.
It’s a Belgian satellite company called neXat that most people in the industry have never heard of.
What neXat does is quite elegant. They multicast audio channels from a satellite to small ground terminals, which then feed directly into FM transmitters.
What this means in practice is that a radio station in a location with no internet, no fibre cable, and no mobile network can receive its content via satellite and broadcast it over FM to listeners who still own the same KES 300 radio they’ve always had.
The technology in the middle changes completely, but the listening experience for the person holding the radio doesn’t change at all. They turn it on, they hear their station, they have no idea the signal came from a satellite. It is a satellite solution that keeps FM alive rather than replacing it, which is the opposite of what most people assume satellite technology does to traditional broadcasting.
I think about this a lot because the global conversation about radio’s future tends to assume that everything is moving to the internet and that FM is becoming obsolete. And for connected markets with smartphones and broadband and reliable electricity, that’s probably true.
But for communities in northern Kenya where the nearest fibre cable is hundreds of kilometres away, a technology like neXat’s is not a step backwards into FM. It’s the most practical way to improve radio distribution right now, today, without waiting for infrastructure that might not arrive for another decade.
The future doesn’t always look like the internet. Sometimes it looks like a satellite dish connected to the same FM transmitter that’s been there for twenty years, doing the same job but doing it better.
Have you come across technologies that are quietly changing how radio works in Africa without making any headlines?
