Week of September 24, 2007

Satellite Radio Listening Up

Friday, September 28, 2007

Arbitron's review of national Spring ratings data shows that satellite radio listening continues to grow. 6.9% of in-tab diaries showed listening to satellite radio, compared to 5.9% a year before. The number of individual channels being listened to also went up.

These increases are modest and understandable. What's most interesting is to see the level of detail that the diarykeepers list for the satellite entries. The overwhelming majority of them include the name of the service, as well as the individual channel.

Podcasting Struggles Continue

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Beyond specific radio successes, the overall business model of podcasting continues to struggle outside of the iTunes Music Store. The latest casualty: Yahoo Podcasts. The idea behind on demand audio appears to fit very neatly into two categories: The convenience and familiarity of national content delivered via iTunes and the local content delivered by specific radio stations, with little success in between.

Tivo For Radio

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

One of the big themes in our 2007 New Media Landscape report released in January was of the empowered consumer. A critical point was that if companies don't provide a solution for consumers, they will provide it themselves, even if it is illegal. We saw this with the launch of Napster, and we see it today with the launch of Radioshift.

Radioshift is a Macintosh application that allows you to record radio for on demand listening. It includes a database of over 50,000 programs and radio stations so that setting up your on demand listening is similar to using a Tivo for television. This also separates it from the Windows program Total Recorder, which requires you to find and manually schedule any audio streams you want to record.

Big Brother Is Listening

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Pudding Media, a San Jose based company is offering a new phone service, similar to Skype, that gives users a chance to make free phone calls in exchange for viewing online ads. The twist is that the ads are tailored to what the user is talking about. Voice recognition software monitors the calls to determine what ad to serve to the user's computer. The ads are further refined by personal information that the users must divulge when they sign up, including age range, sex, zip code and more. Advertisers will pay based on how often users click on an ad. The company says that is this computer-based model is successful, it plans on venturing into mobile phones in the future.

The Old Fall Season

Monday, September 24, 2007

In the TV industry Fall no longer simply means the rollout of the new season of new and returning shows. It's also the time when networks try to make past season of shows available on DVD. Even though DVD sales are off, thanks to various new delivery methods, the release of TV shows is the one bright spot.

Research shows that ratings for TV shows that are available on DVD are higher than those for shows that are not available. It also works to the benefit of the DVD business. According to Nielsen VideoScan, overall DVD sales are down this year by 7%. On the other hand, sales of complete seasons of TV shows are up by 6% this year.