Page "Radio drama" Paragraph 2

“ Seneca has been claimed as a forerunner of radio drama because his plays were performed by readers as sound plays, not by actors as stage plays ; but in this respect Seneca had no significant successors until 20th-century technology made possible the widespread dissemination of sound plays .” Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s.

By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment.

With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, radio drama lost some of its popularity, and in some countries, has never regained large audiences.

However, recordings of OTR ( old-time radio ) survive today in the audio archives of collectors and museums, as well as several online sites such as Internet Archive.