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Looking at the history of the two media, it seems that commercial radio broadcasting only started a few years before films received audio in the 1920s. So it's not surprising that what I'm about to propose did not take place in OTL (waits for EdT to find an obscure example of it actually having done so). Anyway, let's imagine that radio broadcasting becomes mainstream a decade or so earlier - a few years before the Great War. Ignore the butterflies from this for a moment.

What I am suggesting is that silent films could be made without any dialogue cards, and instead dialogue would be broadcast (live, due to the initial lack of recording media) over the radio. Radio sets might well be too expensive for individuals at the time, but each cinema would have its own big radio receiver to receive the broadcast and play it, synched with the film as a dub, to the viewers. As broadcasts would be made live, presumably they would be done with different actors to the ones in the films - and you might need several simultaneous performances for large countries considering the likely state of the broadcast network at the time. That's an interesting thought - imagine a situation where Charlie Chaplin is suddenly voiced, but people in Los Angeles know him with a different voice to people in New York.

Putting this before the Great War means that that conflict might accelerate the use of the technique for newsreels and patriotic films, as well as building up the radio broadcast network for wartime service.

Any huge logical or technical flaws here I'm not seeing?
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