Saving the VB show

So Aer Lingus decide to do the capitalist thing and maximise profits. No wonder there. But why not go the whole hog. If the object is to maximise the use of assets in the pursuit of profit why not sell the airline entirely and invest the money in the arms trade?
There's far more money to be made there. Cluster bombs and land mines have a huge mark-up, I hear.Free market ideology has finally triumphed when the profit motive overwhelms entirly common sense.
But I'm not here to talk about Aer Lingus. I want to talk about the Vincent Browne Show on RTE Radio One. Its demise has been announced. In a similar way to Aer Lingus it has been decided to make better use of the resources that the show uses. So its getting the chop.It's not clear yet what it will be replaced with but current affairs probably won't get a look in. Another music programme is on its way, I suspect.
The VB Show was down to 20,000 listeners. This I seriously doubt. I mean that I doubt that 20,000 people have ever sat down to listen to the show. The nature of radio is that people listen while they are doing something else like driving or ironing clothes.
The 20,000 figure means that this was the average listenership. The number of people listening in was a multiple of this. I know this because I was a listener to the show and I don't think I would ever have listened to it more than two nights in the week. Not because I was trying to avoid it but because I was doing some thing else that didn't allow for listening to the wireless. The occasional listenership was propably near 100,000. Take your pick.
The point is that if you were stuck for something to listen to and you didn't want to listen to the other stations playing music, there it was. A bit of a public servic, if you will.
The question really is why RTE want to pull the plug on a show that has 20,000-100,000 listeners when they have options. One would be to put the show on the internet. Although this is still an underdeveloped medium it is gaining fast and many people now have computers in their kitchen because they want to keep an eye on what the kids are accing on the internet.
A few years ago in the US satelitte radio was unheard of. Now millions of people have bought sets and actually pay a subscription to listen to it. RTE could try something like this.
Another possibility is splitting the waves. RTE Radio One broadcasts on three separate frequencies in Ireland, FM, MW and LW.
Us current affairs types are not all that annoyed about the quality of signal - we would have settled for MW and LW.
Surely, given the options, RTE could have come up with some alternative. If any gig was attracting 20,000 people to a stadium every night it wouldn't be abandoned.