Category Archives: Radio

Radio: Media comfort food

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A couple of new services from Sprint allows “some subscribers to stream live music to the phone in a radio-type format without having to buy a new phone or have lots of storage.”

I don’t have a mobile phone and wouldn’t buy one to stream live music (I didn’t think I’d buy and iPod either) but that’s not the point of this post. When I read this story (in the Seattle Times) I thought, “Where in the hell are the stories about cool things happening in radio?” I realize it is a “mature technology” but, come on… there’s got to be something going on out in radio land. Help me out here.

Dave, you work in/for/around radio. What’s the buzz? What has radio juices flowing? Bob, Morris… tell me something to get me excited. Send me a link and I’ll read/post it.

Then again, maybe radio is like your mom’s cooking. You take it for granted. No, it’s not hot or new or sexy…but it’s always there for you. A funnel cloud was sited near (?) Jefferson City tonight and I turned on my little transistor radio and listened to some pretty good coverage. Not very high tech but reliable and…comforting.

Ten years of streaming

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Finally got around to going through the last box of files that came along with the recent office move. Found a file with notes and correspondence with Mark Cuban (PDF) (November and December, 1995). Cuban was cutting lots of content deals back in those days and he was hot to stream our football and basketball broadcasts. Almost nobody knew what streaming was and it was damned hard to imagine that anyone would ever listen to “the radio” on their computers. His company was called AudioNet back then and became Broadcast.com before he sold to Yahoo! How could that have been 10 years ago? And what will this all look like 10 years from now?

Update: First contact from Cuban was on September 9, 1995.

XM launces “Red Cross Radio”

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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.

Podcasting: It’s all about the links

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“What’s special about podcasting, though, is how it makes it simple for individuals or companies to express themselves and, if what they have to say is interesting, enlightening, or clever, to earn attention. You can point someone to a worthy podcast through a link on your blog, or an e-mail to a friend, in a way you could never point them to a snippet of radio. That’s powerful.”

“Podcasting isn’t about to kill radio or take it over, but as blogs are doing to publishing, it will make the radio industry reevaluate its relationship with the audience and leverage its strength as a mass medium.”

— Boston.com via Dave Winer

Webcast from Nebraska State Fair

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Today our farm network did a live webcast from the Nebraska State Fair. It was a 90 minute panel discussion on technology in agriculture and it was great radio. Except I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on the radio. Just our website. In fact, the last eight or ten ag events we’ve covered have not even been put up on our satellite channel and offered to our affiliated radio stations. We’d love it it they would air these long-form programs but program directors are less and less willing to air more than a short ag report in the middle of the day. And I’m not sure they’re wrong.

Are we (the network) wrong to produce this programming? We’re pretty sure Nebraska corn farmers are interested in anything having to do with ethanol. But if you’re the program director of a radio station in the middle of Nebraska, you ask yourself what percentage of my listeners want to listen to someone talk about corn for an hour. Wouldn’t our listeners rather hear some good country music?

Probably. But, as a former small-town program director, I’m convinced there is a “cool factor” at work here, too. It just isn’t cool to air all that farm stuff. Country music is cool. And everybody likes country music, the people in town and the people on the farm. It’s the safe call.

This is where we encounter the long tail of ag programming. While there may be only a few hundred people that care about the future of ethanol in Nebraska, they care very much. And it’s getting harder and harder for them to find in-depth, real-time programming on their local radio station. Enter the web with streaming audio and podcasts all the rest. You want an hour on sugar beets in southern Indiana? No problem, click here.

Radio stations could have it both ways. Put the longer, in-depth programming on their web site and promote same on the air. But radio station owners do not perceive the need. And they no logner have the staff to do much of anything “extra.” At the same time, their listeners are just a Google search away from that they want. And they don’t care too much about where they get it.

Once upon a time, the only place a farmer in Ogallala could get farm news and prices was on his local radio station. Advertisers who wanted to sell stuff to those farmers only had to advertise on that station. It was the natural order of things. The good old days.