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.
Category Archives: Media & Culture
Gnomedex 5
My idea of a fun vacation is a few days at a technology show, so I’m looking forward to Gnomedex 5.0 coming up in late June in Seattle. I attended the first Gnomedex in Des Moines but missed the last couple. This year’s show looks like a good one. Adam Curry is the keynote speaker and other presenters include: Steve Gillmore, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter and a bunch more. Chris Pirillo is a sharp guy and I’m betting he puts on another great conference.
Connected.
A couple of nuggets from a new Arbitron/Edison Media study (pdf) released today:
* Eight in 10 Americans have access to the Internet from any location. As of January 2005, 81% of consumers have access to the Internet from any location. This is a remarkable rise from the 50% penetration figure from just six years ago (January 1999).
* The number of people with a broadband Internet connection at home equals the number of people with a dial-up connection at home. In January 2001, only 12% of Americans with Internet access at home used a broadband connection. That figure has since quadrupled. Now, in January 2005, 48% of people with home Internet access have broadband, and 48% have dial-up service.
Bill Gates on education
Bill Gates to the nation’s governors at the National Education Summit on High Schools: “America’s high schools are obsolete.” Some data points from Gates’ keynote: The US has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. Only 68 out of every 100 ninth-graders graduate from high school on time, and most need extensive remediation after that. Only 28 of the original ninth-graders make it to their sophomore year in college. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow,” said the Microsoft chairman, who is hiring about half of his new talent overseas.
Mainstream media suffers from “freedom envy”
Peggy Noonan (WSJ.com) wonders if mainstream media suffers from “freedom envy” where bloggers are concerned:
Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago.
This is a really good piece on blogging that –once upon a time– I might have forwarded to the reporters working in our newsrooms. I’ve stopped doing that. With one or two execeptions, our reporters are clueless and/or threatened by the whole notion of blogging. Don’t get it. Don’t want to get it.
Pod-Think.
Consultant John Silliman Dodge recently offered broadcasters his “iPod approach” to programming and marketing radio. In a recent article for FMQB he asks:
“Look at your 21st century customer: Blackberry in one hand, iPod in the other, and a cell phone on the belt. Ask yourself the defining question: how does my radio station fit into this person’s life?”
The internet is the network no one owns.
That jumped out of a post by Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine and –at first glance– it seems too obvious to mention. But the company I work for was started by a man who built and owned (owns) a radio network. He didn’t own the radio stations but he owned the network that provided them content (news, sports, ag). Others might have been able to produce the content but (back then) had no affordable way to deliver that content to the radio stations. When our founder put in a satellite uplink, we had an even greater advantage. Faster, cheaper, better quality.
We still have the satellite uplink and the downlinks and we work with more radio stations than ever. But more and more of our content is now “delivered” to our affiliated stations via the internet. Very close to not needing the satellite system at all. If we were starting the company today, it would almost certainly be web-based. And the podcast explosion is sure to add another interesting dimension.
Other nuggets from Jeff Jarvis’ post:
* The audience often knows the news before we report it.
* A blog is a little First Amendment machine (Jay Rosen)
* Google is a brand killer. People find what they want from any source and don’t credit or remember the source.
NFL podcasts
The National Football League has a deal to make recordings of this year’s remaining playoff games available for portable audio players (iPods, etc). The recordings will be available for purchase at iTunes and other sites that sell audio over the Internet.
Concrete TV
“Concrete Ron describes himself as “perhaps the greatest video editor of all time”, and anyone who’s ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn’t argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of “raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort” in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup.”
Edward Wasserman: “The Next Rebirth of the Media”
Edward Wasserman titled his piece “The Next Rebirth of the Media” but I came away wondering about the future relavence of networks as we know them. Wasserman is a professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA.
“TV will migrate to the Net, and if networks can reach a national audience online, why bother with costly affiliation contracts? By cutting out the needless re-transmitters they keep the entire advertising dollar. But what becomes of broadcast affiliates once theyre no longer affiliates indeed, once theyre no longer broadcasters either, since their audiences wont be getting them over-the-air either? When you click on to your online news and entertainment options, why will you choose your local ex-ABC affiliate? You wont, unless it has something unique to offer namely, the very content that has been most sorely neglected in the current era of non-regulation: local programming.”
Four our five years ago I described the Web as a meteor, far out in space, headed toward earth. We don’t know how big it is… when it’s going to get here… or whether it will miss our little planet or smash ut so bits. But we better start building spaceships. Just in case. Don’t know how to build a spaceship? Better start learning. The meteor is big…and it’s close.