Category: content strategy

The local public TV station aired a documentary this week titled “Pioneers of Primetime.” There was an interesting point made by one of the talking heads: Milton Berle sold TVs. He even joked that he had sold more TVs than RCA. People bought TVs not because they wanted a huge tube-powered fire hazard in their living rooms. They bought them because they wanted access to good old Uncle Milty. Before 1948 there were fewer than 500 sets — the same year Berle went on the air. By 1954, there were 26 million.

On his Hear 2.0 blog, Mark Ramsey points out what is wrong with the new HD Radio campaign. As Ruth Seymour, General Manager at KCRW in Santa Monica recently pointed out, “Content is king.” There is little in the new HD Radio campaign that points to this fact, and Ramsey rightly laments it. The claim of “Hey, we’ve got some stuff!” is not going to cut it for most folks.

We’ve got neither Milton Berle nor the luxury of that brand-new post-WWII media landscape. But we do have the lessons learned of things like AM Stereo and Quadraphonic LPs. The focus needs to be on what listeners can hear, the content — not on the specifics of the equipment. Leave that up to the electronics retailers.

FastCompany.com has an interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark from six years ago. That was a long time ago, and many things have happened since then, but there are still many salient points to be applied to today’s world of Social Networking. It is a refreshing read that gets more to the anthropological drive, the social phenomenon of socialization rather than just another survey of the dizzying array of sites already out there.

Link to the article on Fast Company.

I happened upon this just the other day – KCRW in Santa Monica has a deal with eMusic.com. A cursory search reveals only a couple of KCRW-related titles are available for download. One begins to wonder about the specifics of this promotion…

On a related note, an article in today’s edition of USA Today points out the fact that eMusic.com is #2 in digital music sales, right after the #1 iTunes. The hook for eMusic is their exclusivity among the big digital music retailers in using a non-DRM [Digital Rights Management] locked format. By that I mean the music files downloaded from that site can be played on any player. The other guys require some sort of proprietary technology.

The USA Today article focused on the release of a single from an artist on Sony/BMG Records in the non-DRM format. The irony of Sony, a company so in love with ill-fated proprietary formats [BetaMax, MiniDisc, and the fast-fading SuperAudio CD] releasing a proprietary-DRM-free digital single [with much fanfare] is quite amusing.

Link to USA Today article and to eMusic.com.

Neilsen relased a report earlier this month about the uptake of podcasting divided in the usual Neilsen manner. The demographic results are no surprise, but the language is a wee bit confusing, as pointed out by the MediaShift blog. The excerpt from the Neilsen report:

As is often typical with new technologies, young people are more likely than their older counterparts to engage in audio or video podcasting. Web users between the ages 18 and 24 are nearly twice as likely as the average Web user to download audio podcasts, followed by users in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups, who were also more likely than the average Web user to do audio podcasting. Video podcasters trended a little older, with 25-34 year olds indexing the highest. Web users above the age of 45 were less likely than average to engage in podcasting of either sort.

Things get fuzzy when we can no longer tell if they are talking about creators or users. The numbers are fine, but that language will only serve to further confuse.

Link to the Nielsen report .pdf.