What's more fun that beating a dead horse? I don't know, I'd have to stop beating this one to find out, and I have just one more shot in me.

Although I promised myself I would write more about the technical details and design patterns of good websites in these next few weeks, the XM/Sirius merger (not yet approved by government bigwigs, of course) has been one of the few radio industry stories to get a lot of play outside of our world, and I wanted to take a swing at it.

The interesting thing about the merger is that most of the articles refer to it as a "satellite radio" merger. If you've been reading my columns the past few weeks, you know that satellite is only a delivery method, and in the next few years, delivery methods will become less and less important.

A bit over 25 years ago, Video Killed the Radio Star, or so we were told. Well, the tables have turned - or so The New York Times tells us. Yes, web based video is drawing quite a lot of attention in this Times article, and it is also drawing a lot of attention from website visitors.

Web-based video is big business (over $1.5 billion big if YouTube is worth what Google paid for it), and radio is in the game.

Peer to peer traffic on the internet has always gotten a bad rap. It has been associated almost exclusively with file sharing, or as the RIAA prefers to call file sharing - "The Destruction of Everything Good in the World, like Hugs... and America". But as I explained last week, peer to peer actually has a lot to offer the commercial sector, especially in the media industry.

The World Wide Web was built on the transfer of text files and linking them together. Back when everyone had 14.4 Kbit/s modems, viewing image-heavy pages was a pain. Web site visitors didn't have the bandwidth to download the images fast enough, so they were left waiting. As broadband connections came to home users, and the bandwidth hogs went from pictures to audio to video. Now the problem isn't on the user end, it's on the provider and server end.

So why shouldn't radio take the battle to their turf? Radio is already doing the heavy lifting of content production, why not make it available online?

The Gathering Storm is my look at the future of internet audio and the opportunity and threat it presents to broadcast radio. It started off by splitting the comparison between the two media into three parts – output, delivery method, and content. In the first column, I covered how internet audio, while not quite there yet, is approaching the quality of broadcast radio. In the second, I explained that the delivery method of internet audio is improving every day – to the point where it may be equal or superior to broadcast radio in a few years. Then last week, I looked at content from the stations perspective – this week it’s from the perspective of the air talent.

For reference, this column has nothing whatsoever to do with “Final Justice”, it just makes me chuckle when movies release sequels well after the series should be dead, and give them ridiculous subtitles like “Die Even More Hardest!” Since this was originally a three-parter, I thought the fourth and final installment in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy should keep that tradition alive.