Fresh Air is an essential manual on marketing radio stations and the radio industry, by Mark Ramsey. Read the Who needs "Tagging" for HD radio?
In the news from the UK:
GCap believes it is the first radio group in the world to be streaming live radio to Apple's iPod Touch music player and the iPhone and it sees big opportunities to reach new listeners while also developing revenue streams from selling music.
As this picture shows, this is a pretty dreamy interface.
No "HD tagging" required. No HD radios required, in fact. Why buy a new radio in order to tag your songs when you can do it on an iPod right now?
Just point your iPod here.
It's not exactly effortless, but it works great. Brilliant!
From there they can stream a station, access podcasts and look up the last five songs played. They can buy one of those tracks from Apple's music store, iTunes, or get a whole CD album from the online retailer Amazon. GCap gets a cut of those retail revenues.The service still has glitches, including the fact that wireless broadband delivery makes it hard to listen to radio on the move. Accessing iTunes or Amazon to buy music also stops the radio stream, something GCap's technology team hopes to iron out.
And what's ahead?
GCap also hopes to develop the iPod service so listeners can tag, or bookmark, news items, interviews and promotions they hear and then return to them when they have more time. For example, they could bookmark a promotion for free tissues, said Pembrooke, and when they re-visit the item the pack of tissues is automatically sent.As well as developing "enhanced ads", GCap wants to make its stations available on other new devices coming onto the market.
The main difference between what these guys are doing and what we're focused on in the US is this:
In the US we are obsessed with making HD radio work. While GCap is evidently obsessed with making their brands work, wherever listeners can and will experience them.
Woe unto you if the technology is more important than the brands which that technology will carry.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/9344/26019760
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Who needs "Tagging" for HD radio?:
Obviously, Jobs knew this coming, so one would ask, why did he bother with HD/iPod tagging - well, he got some good publcity, as the loser MSN direct shows:
http://tinyurl.com/3bvp4h
Posted by: Greg | February 11, 2008 at 11:43 AM
Doesn't this well illustrate the futility of chasing technological progress with legal jalopies?
Remember when the press was in a snit because some camera-ready dumbell demonstrated the use of a scanner to hear cell phones? Laws were 'rushed to market' to stop these miscreants. Did the press omit the fact the scanner guy was a shill for the cellular lobby, who coveted public airwaves for itself. Did they also omit the fact that digital cell phones shortly rendered moot, the hastily drawn, sloppy law?
During the 90s, HD was legislated - some wags would say, 'legerdemained' - as the New Eternal Broadcast Standard, even as research suggested HD was already obsolete.
Today, the HD gang persists. They badger the FCC and anyone they see as malleable, in hope of taking our public airwaves via HD's digital jamming.
They spun 'tagging' to pimp off HD. Didn't work. TeamBLOC can pass all the laws they want, and they should do it too - if their dream is to forever alienate radio's remaining listeners.
Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasota Key, Florida
11 February, 2008
Posted by: paul vincent zecchino | February 11, 2008 at 12:07 PM
This is sooooo cool! It's another music delivery system. It's a podcast delivery system. It's another method of delivering what people crave. Sadly, terrestrial radio broadcasting is losing it's point of differentiation daily. Radio still requires one step. Turn it on. Problem is, people are fascinated by content not available on radio. Radio has a lot to learn from this.
Posted by: Dave Mason | February 15, 2008 at 07:15 PM