Andy Boyer

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Category: Media (Page 4 of 12)

Dori Monson Show Experiments with Web Only Cast

March 12, 2009 /

I’m a pretty big fan of talk radio, and the Dori Monson show is near the top of my favorite 3 hours in radio.  Tomorrow (Friday), Monson’s show will get bumped for Mariners baseball at 12:55pm.  For most people, getting an extra 2 hours off on a Friday afternoon in March is a pretty good reason to head home, grab the kids and hit the park.

But I appreciate Monson’s experiment.  He’s going to continue ot broadcast, only on the web, from his page at MyNorthwest.com.  He’s merely curious what kind of listenership he’ll get.

Now some people in management might fear this.  After all, suppose he steals people from the Mariners Spring Training broadcast that they paid all those duckets for rights to?  But on the flip side, suppose they now DON’T lose the news talk junkies who hate sports and wouldn’t stick around to listen to a practice game being played by a 101 loss team?

If it works, it opens up all kinds of neat ideas for broadcasters.  Imagine if Monson did a 45 minute call with a politician, and ran the best 12 minutes on the radio, but you had the chance to listen to the whole thing online?  Or if there’s a topic important to Monson, but not necessarily radio worthy.  He could do an extra hour, complete with call-ins, and have it be Web only.

Bottom line is that the media needs to figure out that the 24-hour programming cycle is becoming a thing of the past.  It’s good to see Monson not only recognizing it, but figuring out ways to embrace it.

Meanwhile, we think the athletes are real

August 12, 2008 /

So what have we learned about China so far thanks to year’s Olympics.  Well, let’s start with some nuggets from a British paper, The Times of London, in this article.

Let’s set aside all the pre-Olympics Tom Foolery of throwing out journalists, censoring Internet sites, jailing a Japanese television crew in West China, shutting down factories, and trying to magically make the pollution go away.

But in the first week of this Games, we have:

  • Fake fireworks so the TV audience thinks they are seeing something spectacular
  • Lip-syncing of the opening song by a cute 7-year old Chinese girl, because the 7 year old girl who really sang it wans’t “cute” enough.
  • Oscar-style “seat fillers” who sit and watch the preliminary rounds of events, then leave when the ticket holders show up, so it doesn’t look like there are any no-shows.

I’m not exactly sure this is what drove the spirit of the games more than 100 years ago.  So if the games themselves can be fake and manufactured, tell me again why the athletes aren’t allowed to use drugs that enhance their own performance?  Don’t sterioids seem to fit perfectly into this charade?

Bonanzle Review – “The Best eBay Alternative We’ve Seen”

July 30, 2008 /

Bonanzle, a young and exciting company we recently started working with, just received a fantastic review from Ecommerce-Guide.com.

An alternative to Craiglist and Ebay, Bonanzle is designed to make it easier for people to buy and sell products online.  Given the state and direction of the economy today, any way to make it easier to move used merchandise is positioned to do well.  Some choice quotes from the article:

“You get Bonanzle
— an eBay alternative that is quite simply, the best I’ve seen in my
four years of reviewing and writing about start-up marketplaces aimed
at taking sellers away from eBay.”

The Bonanzle platform was designed in-house from
the ground up, so not only does the site look very different from other
alternative sites, but this is the reason why the tools and features on
this site are so radically different.

The best way to experience Bonanzle is simply to log
on and try it. What you will find is that Harding and his team of
self-titled “action-minded experts” have managed to offer sellers more
features in this one site than any alternative to date, yet keep the
entire site and selling process simple, compact and super-easy to use.

Check out the whole article, and please Digg it or add it to Delicious if you would be so kind.

Real Life Deal or No Deal for the Blogosphere

July 17, 2008 /

So how much are 2,200 women bloggers worth?   According to NBC, about 5 Million Bucks in Series B investment, which nets out to close to $2300 per blogger.

The deal includes the following:

As part of the arrangement, iVillage, Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com will feature select BlogHer content, while BlogHer’s network is expected to return the favor to varying degrees.

Reaching out to the BlogHer Network has been a common strategy of start-ups who don’t have $5,000, much less $5,000,000 for marketing.  The "Mommy Blogger," which as a term delights and disgusts different people, is an incredibly powerful evangelist for certain product groups.  The process involved digging through the network, finding the right email address, crafting a perfect message, sending an email, and praying. If it works, you get free promotion.  if it doesn’t, you burned a few hours.

But now it will be interesting to see what kind of influence the NBC buy-in will have on this network.  For one thing, I don’t know how much each individual blogger gets from this deal, but I assume it’s a negligble %.  It will also be interesting to see what happens to bloggers in the network if they rip on NBC programming, or promote programming of other networks.

Regardless, it’s a nice acknowledgment that the BlogHer network has become a powerful piece of the social media matrix.   Congrats on the investment.

 

Rossi vs Gregoire Radio Ad War Begins

July 11, 2008 /

I love political season.  Nothing better than a good old fashion radio ad war being waged by people who don’t normally write radio ads.  Today on KJR, I heard what may have been the funniest 20 minutes of political radio the all-sports station has ever run. 

1) At about 8:20am, Steve Sandmeyer interviews Dino Rossi.  In the 10 minute interview, Rossi addresses the issue KJR listeners care about most, mainly the Legislature’s inability to make any kind of decision on the Sonics situation.  Rossi restated his previous positions, that all Gregoire and the Legislature had to do was AUTHORIZE King County to extend the current tax that tourists pay on rental cars, hotels, etc…past 2011 when it currently expires.  They didn’t have to vote to extend the tax, they had to vote to authorize King County to vote for the tax.  Rossi continued by saying that he knew it was a political hot potato, so to make sure Gregoire wouldn’t take a fall, he publicly endorsed it before her. That way she could endorse it without him being able to use it against her.  Then he got a nice jab in by calling Frank Chopp the “pseudo-governor” and that Gregoire is too afraid to do anything without his approval.  Score multiple points for Rossi.

2) Interview ends at 8:30 or so, and in the next commercial break, you get a response ad from Team Gregoire.  Basic text of the ad – “Rossi is like George Bush because he cut back on child protection services, is anti-abortion, votes against gay marriage and cut transportation funding.  See, he’s just like George Bush.  And did we mention he is like George Bush?  So, you obviously don’t want George Bush.  Paid for by friends of Gregoire.”  Gay marriage and abortion rights?  The Sonics have just been ripped from the city, fans blame you for this, and 8 days later you run an ad telling sports fans that Rossi is against abortion rights?  Really?  That’s the most compelling argument you have to make to sports fans feeling pain?

3) 10 minutes later, you hear a Rossi ad that has been playing a while. The ad quotes the Seattle Times, “Gregoire showed the leadership skills of a rookie Point Guard.” The ads also says that when Gregoire had a chance to do something extraordinary, she chose to sit on the bench.  Ouch.  Ouch again.  Score more points for Rossi.

4) As if this wasn’t enough, the Gregoire campaign found it necessary to run the same ineffective ad a second time 10 minutes later.  I guess they really wanted Sonics fans to know that Dino Rossi is anti-abortion.  It’s like walking into Capitol Hill and talking about policy on shipping tariffs.  Or going to the Apple farmers to discuss H1B visas.

The KJR vote is going to Rossi.  So I’m not sure Gregoire’s play here.  She either has to be loud and vocal about pushing through the new stadium legislation this session, or just ignore those voters and spend money somewhere else.  But if I won ana election by 2,000 votes, and an entire segment of people who never vote just learned how to register, I’d be nervous.  

What If…. Google Hadn’t Bought YouTube?

July 9, 2008 /

Adotas has a story today about Google’s problems monetizing YouTube. 

If you remember, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.7 Billion, which after complex calucaltions, came out to be a multiple of about $1.7 Billion.  That’s not true, they made some money, but the valuation was shocking.  Revenue this year is estimated to be $200 Million.  A fine amount of money. 

But, my goodness the costs must be enormous.  How many trillion streams are they broadcasting at what processor and bandwidth cost?   Wikipedia estimates $1 Million per day on Bandwidth alone.

So now imagine for a second that Google had not bought YouTube, and allowed it to lose money at an astonishing rate.  If YouTube was currently running around the investor community asking people to pony up money to fund the TV watching habits of the next generation.  At some point, the bleeding would have to stop.  Imagine some new scenarios for owners of YouTube:

  1. Comcast:  *Poof* All of a sudden it’s a paid subscription channel, and no copyrighted broadcasts would make it to air.
  2. Microsoft?: YouTube becomes MSN Video
  3. An "Orbitz-like" joint partnership between Disney, Viacom, and General Electric: YouTube meets Hulu.
  4. Fox: The new MySpace Videos?

I guess my point is that next time you are enjoying some free entertainment, be happy YouTube was bought by a company who thought it was a cool idea, and would figure out how to make money on it 5-10 years down the road.

 

 

In a related story, signups for rugby leagues rose 143%

July 7, 2008 /

You gotta wonder how a TV company can make this kind of blunder…According to the BBC:

New Zealand rugby fans watching a regular sports programme found themselves viewing hardcore pornography instead on Sunday afternoon.

Four minutes of pornography interrupted sports coverage on the Prime Television channel, after what a spokesman described as a distribution mix up.

The pornographic footage was meant for an adult pay-per-view channel. Instead, it found its way onto a regular free-to-air programme called "Grassroots Rugby".

Rival television channels reported that some viewers were angry about the broadcast, which may have been seen by children.

 

And yes, I am fully aware that when I run for public office someday, some crackpot reporter will Google my name and the word "pornography" and momentarily think he hit the jackpot…

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