XM Ben attended the Rolling Stones concert Monday night (DC) and managed to get backstage where he had his photo taken spooning Ron Wood. I think that qualifies as a Brush with Near Greatness.
It flashed me back to 1964 (my sophomore year in high school) when the Rolling Stones were all over the radio. We had never heard anything remotely like them. How can they possibly be touring 40 years later?
The American Red Cross and XM Satellite Radio have joined forces to launch Red Cross Radio, a 24-hour, nationwide XM channel to provide help and information for Hurricane Katrina victims, Red Cross staff and volunteers along the Gulf Coast, and other Red Cross workers across the country. Former Learfielder and Jeff City expat Ben Krech played a big role in getting the project airborne.
This is just a very different listening experience. The player displays the artist and title currently playing each of my preset channels. Listening can be as passive or interactive as mood dictates. And the audio quality (on my DSL connection) is pretty amazing. Radio good enough to pay for.
XM Satellite Radio announced Monday it has signed a multi-year content agreement with Air America Radio, making XM the exclusive satellite radio network for the left-leaning radio network. Financial terms were not disclosed. When the deal begins in May, Air America Radio will no longer air on Sirius Satellite Radio, which has 1.2 million subscribers to XM’s nearly 3.8 million.
Have you seen Left of the Dial, the excellent HBO documentary about the start-up of Air America? Painful but I could not look away.
Okay, this is neater than I expected. The new subscription structure includes XM Radio Online (doesn’t include all channels). As a rule, I don’t care to listen to anything while I’m online. Breaks my concentration. But XM has an excellent UI and it all just works. I might look into some of the wireless appliances (is it a radio?) you can tote around the house, listening to your favorite XM channels. Or any Internet radio for that matter. Stay tuned.
Two interesting nuggets from (still another) NTY story on satellite radio. 1) Total (XM + Sirius) subscribers will probably surpass eight million by the end of the year, “making satellite radio one fo the fastest-growing technologies ever – faster, for example than cellpones. 2) Steven Van Zandt (E Street Band and Sopranos) programs two music channels for Sirius.
Some interesting stats coming out of the Kagan Radio/TV Summit in New York. The CIBC World Markets director of research says radio can expect an overall 2.5% annual radio audience decline this year owing primarily to iPods and satellite radio.
According to independent research commissioned by Sirius, once consumers get a Sirius radio, they spend 83% of their radio time with Sirius and 7% with traditional radio. So whats commercal radio to do? According to the presentation: Increase local content; upgrade national sales efforts; get better research data; Hire TV people (“they know how to sell in a declining market.”)
The news director at the station in my home town called this morning to ask about my brother. Lots of folks in Kennett know he is in Indonesia and have been asking about him. I told him what little I knew. Just a little human interest story. Very local. A big city station or a “nothing but the hits” station wouldn’t consider this remotely newsworthy. I’m really glad to know they’ve started doing this kind of local news again (maybe they never stopped).
At about the same time, I received a pointer (from XM Ben) to an interesting article on the state of radio in 2004 (Radio in 2004: An Overview, by Lawrence Stoler):
“One of radio’s strong points that can not necessarily be achieved to the fullest extent on satellite radio is localism. In other words, being out and active in the community. Being at the scene of an important event at a moment’s notice and providing necessary information to the residents of where a station is licensed to broadcast. The industry has to resume this practice of being community active. Radio has to go back to providing information after 8:30 AM during the week or in the evening after #7 and on weekends too. Not every area of the country has a 24 hour all news station within hearable range.”
I honestly don’t see how radio stations (or TV stations, for that matter) will survive without a strong, serious commitment to local news.
When I first started working at the radio station (1972), we were required to take transmitter readings every 15 minutes. Keeping the transmitter on was the number one –and obvious– priority. And I guess that’s still true for radio stations today. No transmitter…no radio. But not for TV.
On Monday we noticed we were not receiving the local ABC affiliate. Just static. We watch very little network TV these days but still try to catch Peter Jennings and we’re hanging in for the final season of NYPD Blue. So I called the TV station and asked the lady who answered the phone what was going on.
“One of our transmitter tubes went out over the weekend but you can get us on the cable,” she explained.
“I don’t have cable,” I infomed her.
“So, how do you watch us?”
“I have an antenna.”
“Oh. Well, we should have the transmitter working again by the end of the week.”
This struck me as something of a revelation. The TV station wasn’t concerned that their trasmitter was down. The “signal” (content) was getting out via cable. I wanted to ask her about the rural viewers that don’t have cable but there aren’t enough of us to pose a problem.
I started wondering what does the local TV station add to the content mix? Their local newscast. Local weather. Bunch of local commercials. It just feels like those local affiliates are becoming less important every day.
All of this reminded me of ABC Now, the network’s effort to deliver content by non-traditional means. How much would I pay to be able to download World News Tonight directly from the network? Or NYPD Blue? I’m already doing this with XM and it works just fine, thank you.
In conclusion, I guess I’m no more concerned about the TV station transmitter being dark than they are.
on covering the GOP convention: “We want to find out actual information about Republicans. We want to know where the pods are, where they’re grown, and we want to photograph them before they’re harvested.” Next to XM’s “Everything, All the Time,” The Daily Show’s “The Most Trusted Name in Fake News” might be the best tag line ever.