Tag Archives: Radio

Apple wants to be your news and information station

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“An Apple patent reveals that the company is working on a podcast aggregator that would dynamically collect the news that you are interested in and deliver a personalized news podcast. In other words – Apple wants to be your news and information station. The system would allow you to:

* Subscribe to and personalize a podcast with software like iTunes;
* Select news segments selected from a variety of categories; and
* Automatically download the personalized podcast to your Apple TV, iPod or iPhone.

The custom news show could consist of a 5 minute segment from CNN on the day’s national news, a 5 minute segment from a local news station, and a 10 minute segment on sports highlights from ESPN.

Once you select the playlist of content that you’re interested in, Apple’s servers would request the latest podcast content from content creators, stitch the segments together and then deliver the personalized podcast to iTunes or other podcast software. As part of this process, Apple could insert targeted advertising dynamically.” – Apple Insider via Podcasting News

Hmmm. A listener in the states served by our networks could include one of our 4 minute state newscasts, a three minutes sports report and a farm report. That “stitching segments together” part is what I find intriguing. Terry Heaton wrote about the “unbundling” of media. Is this a “re-bundling” of media?

If I were programming a local radio station, I’d be damned sure I had a killer local newscast/podcast up on iTunes.

Where is the innovation in radio?

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“Where are the new formats? Where is the new talent? Why is Talk Radio pretty much the only form of radio that isn’t music-intensive? Why are most Talkers late-middle-aged conservative white dudes? Our non-music format options are ridiculously thin – why?” — Mark Ramsey

I’ve wondered the same thing. It’s not uncommon for an owner to have five or six stations in a market, running some safe format on everyone of them. As Mr. Ramsey points out in his post, to try something innovative would require imagination, talent and guts. Short supply these days.

Tough Room: Editorial meeting of The Onion

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In last week’s This American Life, host Ira Glass lived one of my fantasies. He sat in on an editorial meeting of The Onion, “where there’s one laugh for every 100 jokes.”

“They start with over 600 potential headlines for their fake-news newspaper each week, and over the course of two days, in the very tough room that is their editorial conference room, they select 16 to go in the paper.”

Public radio and podcasting

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Mark Ramsey points us to an interesting piece by “The Long Tail’s” Chris Anderson on how his listening behavior to public radio has been transformed by podcasting.

“I realized that I don’t really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others. My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station. My engagement with public radio is at a more granular level than the affiliate.

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.

But look at the arc of history here. The podcast model is getting cheaper and more ubiquitously available (who doesn’t have a cellphone?), and it serves individual needs and taste better. Meanwhile the broadcast model, which is all about one-size-fits-all taste, is based on human labor costs and costly transmission equipment and is only getting more expensive. You can see how this story ends.”

I’ve had the same guilty thoughts about my own listening habits. I like a lot of NPR programs but listen to them as podcasts. And I would be willing to pay for the best shows (This American Life, for example).

IpodspeakerAnd my morning listening routine has improved with the purchase of a small speaker/doc for my iPod nano. Each evening iTunes downloads any new podcasts to which I’m subscribed, and syncs to the nano. In the morning I pop the nano into the speaker dock and listen to a perfectly customized line-up of progams.

Ten in a row!

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Mark Ramsey shares some thoughts on a story in the Sunday Times of London about the growing number of Brits tuning in to personalized Internet “radio” every week (and tuning out traditional radio).

Sunday Times: “Personalised broadcasts of the future will probably have either advertising or a price tag attached, just as they do today. But once your radio knows exactly what you want to hear, the idea of a human DJ – however cheeky his banter – might start to sound a little dated.”

Ramsey: “Over the long haul I fully expect the influence of music-oriented radio to diminish. Because music, my friends, is a commodity. Not only can anyone string together a playlist, but nobody can string together my favorite playlist better than I can.”

“What it all adds up to is the gradual near-obsolescence of music radio, not in a blink, but by a slow and persistent siphoning of audience and attention and interest and advertisers. This process will take years to happen.”

I read a lot of stories like this but very few on the impact of Internet “stations” on non-music formats. Are news-talk formats feeling any effect from the web? My radio pals can feel free to post an anonymous comment.

Nanotube Radio

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Some researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have constructed "a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver, orders-of-magnitude smaller than any previous radio, from a single carbon nanotube. The single nanotube serves, at once, as all major components of a radio: antenna, tuner, amplifier, and demodulator."

"The nanotube radio’s extremely small size could enable radical new applications such as radio controlled devices small enough to exist in the human bloodstream, or simply smaller, cheaper, and more efficient wireless devices such as cellular phones."

They’ve provided short videos of this little bugger playing Layla, Good Vibrations, and the Star Wars theme. [Thanks, Trish]

“Public Media”

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Doc Searls says the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

“We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder. Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods.

Will this someday be an issue for our networks? Radio Iowa. Wisconsin Radio Network. Nebraska Radio Network. Time will tell.

Make iPhone listen to radio, tell you what’s playing

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“You’re riding in the car and a great song comes on the radio. You’re dying to know what it is so you can go buy it ASAP but there’s no satellite radio receiver to tell you what’s playing. How can you find out what song it is? Whip out your iPhone, put it near the car speakers, and watch the screen. Poof! There’s the song, artist, and album.” — TUAW.COM

Okay. This could make me trade in my Tracfone. iPhoner Tom promises to try this out and let me know how it works.

Merging radio and the web

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One of our affiliate relations reps shared this story with me a few days ago and I’m posting it so I can find it later. And I might have some of the particulars wrong but they don’t change the point of the story.

Small market radio station manager gets a call from a program syndicator, trying to clear a three hour Christmas special. The station manager doesn’t want to commit that much time but likes the program and suggests they put the program on the station’s website, clear the syndicator’s commercials on the radio station and promote the special (online) on the air.

Hmmm.

Now, every program provider will tell you how important it is that the spots air inside the programming. They might have even sold that aspect to the advertisers. But when all is said and done (note that I did not say, "At the end of the day"), it’s really about getting the spots on the air.

Is there some obvious synergy here? Could web-savvy radio stations take this approach to enrich their online offering and pull more local listeners (and advertisers) to their websites?

And while there are only 24 hours in the on-air programming clock, there are no limits online. A station could have a sports "channel," an ag channel, a home fix-up channel and on and on.

Yes, I see the limitation. For now, it’s those 30 second radios spots that have value to the advertiser. The radio station still has to program a radio station the people want to listen to.

And all my "what if’s" and "how about’s" are predicated on the idea that radio stations must be more than "radio" stations. They’ve got to find a way to survive online. We all do.

If I had a little AM Daytimer (insert joke here), I might fill my air time with excerpts from a wide variety of programming (as local as I could afford to make it) on my website(s).

As for networks and syndicators that rely on getting their programs (commercials) on all those radio stations… their fortunes are tied to the radio stations. To paraphrase the old saw about land, God isn’t making any more 30’s and 60’s. But He/She has an endless supply of web pages.