A whole bunch of future arrives at once
Should you by some chance diligently follow all the suggested sources in my blogroll, this may be an especially unenlightening post. On the other hand…
Yesterday Doc Searls very nicely encapsulated what seems to me like a very plausible scenario for what’s apt to happen to “radio” once iPhones and their ilk really take hold. Doc’s post, jumping off an analysis by Andrew Leyden, is on his Linux Journal blog.
At nearly the same time and at the opposite end of the Northeast Corridor from Doc’s command post at Harvard, Amy Schriefer from the music operation at NPR digital media puts out a call on “inside NPR.org” for NPR music iPhone apps you’d like to see. npr.org/music has a budget that’s pretty much a rounding error in terms of the overall public radio economy, but no need to dwell on that here – in boxing terms, they punch above their weight class…
And a couple of floors above Amy at NPR headquarters, CEO Dennis Haarsager posts about his recent appearance on “The Gillmor Gang” podcast to explain NPR’s new application programming interface, a tool to help people connect themselves more completely and easily to NPR’s online content. This is pretty geeky stuff, but not insignificant.
And Rob Paterson thoughtfully reminds us that the ground beneath our feet, in the manner of Wile E. Coyote, will crumble at any minute (if indeed it hasn’t already). Rob was perhaps a bit irked by the reaction Jeff Jarvis got during a panel on social media at the Public Radio News Directors conference last week, which Jeff previews here and tells about how it went here.
This weekend the KUSP staff will be finishing our recommendations to our board of directors on how our public radio station gets from where we are (informed by 36 years of over-the-air broadcasting on a single channel, and about a third as much time serving you online here at kusp.org) to where we think we need to be (multiple channels with multiple services, on FM and on the Internet). We see this as a pretty complex task that will take some time to execute, but all the above signs (and many many more) tell us we need to get started. Now.
At its monthly meeting on Monday, the board will have the opportunity to approve our operating plan and budget for the next year, which would bring along significant changes we believe will improve our service to you. It’s a public meeting, so come join us if you’d like: 6:00 PM on Monday July 28, at the KUSP studios at 203 8th Avenue in Santa Cruz.
Doc Searls said,
July 31, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
Thanks for the linkage, Terry, and for filling us in on other stuff that’s been going on.
Obviously (though perhaps less than it should be), radio is becoming a system of hedging bets. You keep investing in transmitter maintenance and translator development while also investing in streaming, HD radio and everything else that isn’t expensive and exposes the operation to new possibilities for growth, listener relationship and revenue.
But it’s essential not to get too mired in the past that’s still present. An executive at one of the big-market public stations last year told me he had grown tired of what he called “transmitter mentality.” Never mind that most of the listening growth is coming over the Net, or that the percentage of listeners paying to become members is higher on line than on the air. All the energy continues to go radio-as-usual and keeping the old flywheels spinning.
Well, ya gotta keep the home fires burning. You just can’t do *only* that. Hey, I’d love it if in the U.S. we had *real* RDS in over-the-air radio. That way when I drive up 101 from Paso Robles to Monterey Bay my radio would say “KUSP” even though it switched from 91.7 to 88.9. But lobbying for that is a waste of effort. Better to put energies into, say, streams of multiple bitrates so iPhone radio tuners could switch between streams when the listener moves between cell and wi-fi connections. Stream-radios for mobile devices, especially the iPhone, are inevitable (as well as something we’re working on at ProjectVRM), and it will pay to be ready for that.
Anyway, I think the future is really quite bright for stations that embrace it. Looks like you’re doing that at KUSP. Rock on.