:::PARIS LIVE RADIO :::.

"I thought the weight of history was against us getting it," Duncan said. He is Australian, but still, his mother country was siding with the Americans and the British on the divisive Iraq conflict. France opposed the war.

Just as Duncan was preparing his business plan and license application, language itself had become a kind of grenade launcher, managing to affect, for example, the un-French vocabulary that members of the U.S. Congress used to order deep-fried potatoes at lunch.

As it turned out, the French officials had no qualms about flipping the on-switch for the English-language station, according to Duncan and Stï¿½phane Lieser, who steered the license request through the CSA, the French authority that grants broadcast licenses. And the CSA, the Conseil Supï¿½rieur de l'Audiovisuel, confirmed that Paris Live Radio was the first commercial English station in Paris.

"I was amazed," Duncan, 38, said. "The only person worrying about it was me, and it turned out I didn't need to worry about it."

Thus, since May 11, Paris Live Radio has been reaching what it says is 30,000 daily listeners, albeit by nontraditional signal paths: cable TV and satellite radio channels and streaming over the Internet via www.parislive.net. PLR is also participating in the testing phase for fledgling digital radio in France.

The station is not licensed yet for AM or FM radio, which could bring a much larger audience. But Lieser, who advised Duncan to start small, said an AM license was next on the application agenda. Duncan hopes the station will join the crowded FM band in 2005, but neither license application has yet been submitted.

Most current listeners hear the station via cable and satellite TV services, offered in and around Paris by companies including Canal Satellite, Canal Plus TV, Noos and NC Numericable.

Subscribers on those cable systems tune their television sets to special radio channels on the cable dial. The channels offer a list, and the users select from it to play broadcasts of many local radio stations.

In Britain and Germany, digital radio is becoming an established medium with stations starting up and offering exclusively digital broadcasts.

Duncan said he did not expect France's market to catch up to the potential being leveraged elsewhere for several years. But, he said, he expects digital to be the dominant radio format within a decade in France.

In Britain, which leads Europe in the digital radio market, shipments of consumer digital radios - more than 30 brands of portable radios, home radios and car radios available at varying prices from as low as ï¿½60, or $110 - are forecast to reach half a million units in 2004, according to the research firm In-Stat/MBR, based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Throughout the European Union, In-Stat/MBR forecasts that the number of listeners for digital radio will grow from several hundred thousand in 2003 to six million in 2007.

Lieser, a media attorney, said approval for the license hinged only on meeting the legal requirements that the CSA sets for any station. Those requirements cover a statement of ownership and investors, which confirm the station's financial standing and business plan.

Culturally, the agency looks for things that add diversity to the offerings on the spectrum, and Paris Live Radio, Lieser said, had a huge advantage on that count. There was no other station like it.

Despite Duncan's concerns, the approval process never encountered any questions of politics, culture or language.

"The linguistic and cultural aspects are so irrelevant here," Lieser said.

Judging by the experience of Paris Live Radio, in fact, it looks as if the only reason no one had started an English station before is that no one had tried.

The absence of an English-language radio station surprised Duncan, he said, when he first stayed in Paris, in the mid-'90s.

Back in Sydney, he said, he could tune in to French-language programming on the Australian radio dial. That was why he assumed, given the existence of other foreign-language radio stations in Paris, that English would be among them.

When he returned to France with his French wife and their son in 2000, he gave up his job working at a French law firm and decided to start the station.

So for now, those among Paris's 200,000-plus anglophone expatriate community who can tune to one of Paris Live Radio's signals find a menu of brief on-the-hour news updates, information as diverse as local events, language and cultural tips and the major component, pop music.

On that score, the station must meet the same legal requirement as any music station in France: a minimum of 40 percent French artists.

Chris Oakes - International Herald Tribune