Month: October 2006

While touring the CNN Center last week in Atlanta, I was handed a tag that I was instructed to wear at all times. On the reverse of this tag was a handy space for CNN to do a bit of focused advertising. The advert on mine was for the CNN Pipeline service. As the tag reads, you can try it free for two weeks.

I visited the site upon my return to find that the service is available for only $2.95 per month. That seems reasonable even to my painfully thrifty eyes. What do you get for $2.95? Access to live, unfiltered video feeds, four in total. Access to over 2,000 hours of video archives of CNN.com. Breaking news alerts on your desktop.

To me, it seems that CNN has the right idea here. They have the content. They have made the content easy to access. They have established a reasonable monthly fee for the service. They are leveraging their live content in parallel with their archive, fitting in with the Long Tail concept.

Bravo, CNN.

The issue of relevance in the community has come up in recent posts about terrestrial stations’ viability in the realm of non-terrestrial distribution. One example of how this is done in a number of ways is by the upper-Midwest empire that is Minnesota Public Radio. For the sake of brevity, the focus will be on two contrasting points of entry into the community.

The first, as I was to discover after stepping out of the bus, was prominently displayed on a Presbyterian Church sign. The church was hosting a Town Hall Forum featuring Michael Mandelbaum. MPR will later broadcast this on their Midmorning talk program. This in itself is not a great leap. However, in terms of branding, having a station logo placard for placement on a chuch sign rather is. Not just MPR in regular letters, but the proper logo and font and color scheme. [See above picture.] This is branding with thought at all levels.

The other example was that of MPR’s alt-rock station KCMP, better known as The Current. There have been literally hundreds of events with The Current as the media sponsor. I am not sure what that exactly means, or what sort of fiscal outlay that requires. I do recall the saturation reaching such a level that employees of the now closed Let It Be record store were making fun of it. The local dirty rock club which I am a sometimes patron, the legendary First Avenue had a semi-permanent The Current sign with prominent window placement. It was gone when I passed by today; all I could find was this:

This amount of resource and effort has garnered a certain level of visibility and non-radio penetration into the community. They are appealing in different ways to disparate groups, to their credit. Will this benefit their loyalty? Will it be of great enough effect to preserve listenership in the world of ever expanding media choices and delivery?

The recent ComScore study that revealed the demographic changes that social networking juggernaut MySpace is undergoing a rapid and universe-altering change. From the study:
“As social networking sites have become mainstream, the demographic composition of MySpace.com has changed considerably. Last year half of the site’s visitors were at least 25 years old, while today more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors are age 25 or older.”

Even measurement of social networking sites can be troublesome. Podcasting hosting site Odeo‘s CEO Evan Williams posted an interesting bit on his blog titled “Pageviews are Obsolete.”

Last month, the Annenberg Online Jouinalism Review posted an article about the UK newspaper The Guardian designing communities around the their old media. They needed to build a system to facilitate the discussions about their content that was taking place elsewhere. Comment is Free, the title of the site, has been viewed as a bit of a halfway solution, with editors vetting each item before they go live, rather than letting the community have their say. They have had some troubles in that regard, but also some successes.

This social networking thing is tough. But, there are a few that are doing it right [and others that are not]. Here is a portion of one social media scorecard according to Mike Arrington in an article on ZDNet:

Winners [obvious, as they are the ones most prominent]:

• Flickr
• MySpace
• Blogger

What were they thinking:

• Gather.com
• Jigsaw
• Squidoo

One of my colleages attended the PBS Development Conference. An analogy for building a solid social networking platform was laid out in one of the sessions, in a very simple manner. It is like a house:

• Foundation – rock-solid with footings or on quicksand?
• Entrance – is the welcome mat inviting?
• Kitchen – are the chefs competent?
• Dining Room – how do you ‘serve’ your model?
• Electrical Panel – hidden from view, but neccesary.
• Energy – how is it powered?
• Attic – unused / under valued?
• Architecture – is it designed with natural flow in mind?

Go forth with hammers and levels and measuring tape, for there are more houses to be built.

Kurt Hanson’s Radio and Internet Newletter recently quoted a report from Radio Business Report [subscription required] that theorized a loss in radio TSL [time spent listening] from automobile iPod/portable music player integration.

The figures for the coming year in the auto industry are astonishing: seventy percent of new models will feature connections of one sort or another for people to connect their players.

Here is the important part:

To fill these portable players & iPods, folks are ripping their own CDs, or their friends’, as the BBC has reported. They are not rushing to the iTunes site to fill those gigabytes upon gigabytes with songs at $.99 a pop. Apple is surely aware of this. No one in their right mind would think that users would fill up a 5,000-song iPod with $5,000 worth of $.99 songs. Only 5% of the songs on the iPods are from iTunes, says the above BBC story.

That hasn’t kept Starbucks from partnering with iTunes in hopes of sprouting a sixth or seventh finger on their all-powerful music tastemaker death-grip. Or Best Buy from teaming with RealNetworks and Sandisk to provide an iTunes-like service.

To me, this looks like a situation similar to that of the mixtape. A really huge, 5,000 song mixtape. At some point, many folks want to be curated at. They want to be informed about what’s what, something that radio is ever-capable of doing.

A recent story in the New Yorker tells of Geoprge Orwell reveiwing a book about Mass-Observation titled The Pub and the People. Orwell remarked that the pub was in danger of being “gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and radio.” Last I heard, pubs are still doing well. So is radio. Despite the iPod. The appeal of the iPod may well be druglike, but it is not passive.

Thank goodness for the passive, drug-like pleasures of radio.

With the advent of broadband, the world of on-demand audio has become more of a reality. Services like Rhapsody provide on-demand streaming of songs in its purest form — if you want to hear a song, you search for it, and play it in its entirety, if available.

Two variations of on-demand are vying for the attention of web-savvy music fiends the newly-released-to-beta Finetune and the year-old Pandora. Both have huge back catalogs of songs available for streaming. The difference is in the user experience. Pandora’s interface asks the user to enter a song or artist, and their system plays similar artists or songs based upon metrics established by their paid team of in-house taxonomers. Users can offer a degree of input by giving a thumbs-up or -down to the song, and they can skip a song if they don’t care for it [at least a few times each hour; more than that and they will shoot you a pop-up saying that you have to wait to do that again].

Finetune travels a different route by using a more web 2.0 method — other users create playlists. Listeners can choose one of three options:

• Listen to the playlists created by Finetune [broken down into the usual categories like classic rock, pop, R&B, etc.]

• Choose an artist and let the system play similar tunes/artists, much like Pandora

• Listen to a playlist created by a registered user [users can easily sign up to create playlists of their own.]

Rhapsody seemed to be a threat to radio by offering thousands upon thousands of songs at the click of a link. Pandora took it a step further with their interesting concept of RIYL [recommended if you like] system. Finetune takes things one step beyond with the social media aspect. As these services become more sophisticated and wifi becomes more prevalent, terrestrial music radio stations and their internet radio counterparts will have a harder and harder time filling the niches that the global village of the internet so well accomodates.

As the Bridge Ratings hath shewn, the big growth area to be realized by radio-like industry will likely in the realm of internet radio. See this graph for an eye-popping projection. By 2020 those numbers fast approach those of the slowly declining terrestrial radio. HD Radio is far behind.

Manufacturers are lining up. The most recent device garnering buzz is the TorianWireless device. There are several phone/PDA/Treo-like devices that have the capability to play internet radio / audio, but they are quite expensive and require a bit more of the users. The simpler Torian product looks to be the first dedicated portable wifi radio. It will certainly be one of many upcoming products that will feature wifi radio.

The Edge, a rock station in Toronto, has created a landing page for cellphones and PDA devices. Radio World reports that this is set to coincide with the rollout of city-wide wifi.

Other stations, I presume, will follow suit. Those stations with a great presence and relevance in the community should do quite well by this. Make the web stream [or more than one — be the trusted curator of content] available and promote it as part of the station’s stance on cutting edge technology. Tell the listeners about the option to listen to via PDAs, mobile phones, and wifi units.

Most likely, this will provide more listeners than an HD2 or HD3 stream. Especially if those Bridge Ratings predictions pan out. More and more communities are installing city-wide wifi, and the 4g mobile network is right around the corner.

Don’t fear it.

Take advantage of it.