KCRW and the price of success online
February 26, 2007 | 5:55
pm
Public radio broadcaster KCRW in Santa Monica recently touted a $600,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation to support the station's efforts online. This was the silver lining of a cloud, however. In the view of KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour, the more a public station succeeds online, the more it undermines its survival. Get her perspective at the Bit Player blog.
A number of these problem would go away if the Internet moved to IPv6, which implicitly supports multicasting. The problem with this is, as I understand it, that it to some degree pushes a lot of technical issues to the network's core rather than at the endpoints (i.e., the burden of supporting a given amount of traffic is no longer tied to the number of servers at the origin, but on the intermediate routers' ability to support the traffic). The economic model is somewhat dicier for some players; MLBAM (Major League Baseball Advanced Media), as an example, has a lot invested in the current order, and might well oppose a general change. It's not clear that we'll ever make the switch, which seems to be a terrible waste of resources.
Posted by: Rob McMillin | February 27, 2007 at 11:25 PM
A lot of other stations will be watching to see how this goes.
I would offer advertising as usual on my radio, with a discount for that same ad online.
There are stat trackers out there that can monitor Web traffic and show where visitors come from.
It would be a good tool in this case.
Advertisers want to know who and where their target audience is.
This tool will help show them.
Dollars spent in the right way will bring even more dollars in.
I love advertising.
To me, it is a passion.
Radio is alive and well.
I could go on about this for a week, but I won't.
There are other blogs to read.
I am interested in seeing how KCRW does in their online efforts.
George Vreeland Hill
Posted by: George Vreeland Hill | February 26, 2007 at 06:37 PM