Technology360

The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio's Digital Platforms (video info, too)

I'm beginning to think of my iPhone with its free Public Radio Tuner app as my "infinite dial," having just had the experience yesterday morning of an early drive from Baltimore to Washington listening to WSIU in Carbondale, IL by simply plugging my iPhone into my car's sound system.  [Hint to pubcasters:  WSIU's signal that morning was very reliable and sounded great, but the higher bitrates some stations are using contribute no fidelity that you can detect in a car and have many, many more dropouts.]

However, in this case, it refers to a study of this name from Edison Research and Arbitron:

We update the status of radio's new digital platforms (online radio, satellite radio, HD Radio, and podcasting among others), social networks, online video, iPhones, and implications for broadcasters, advertisers, and media planners.

They say, for example, that an estimated 69 million Americans listened to online radio in the last month and that weekly online listening (42 million) is up by one-third year over year.  The same number of people who listen to internet radio in a month watch internet video in a week (69MM).  For satellite and HD Radio, there are awareness data only.  Finally, in spite of the rapid growth in internet radio listening, 80% of people say yes to, "In the future, you will continue to listen to AM/FM radio as much as you do now, despite increasing advancements in technology?"

A rich study.  Link:  Edison Research.  --Dennis

Will Apple Kill Sirius XM?

I get a little tired of the blogger and columnist cliché that [insert disruptive technology here] will kill off [insert legacy technology here], but if you can get past that, Mike Elgan makes some excellent points about the superior "radioness" of the iPhone (I have one), especially with the many radio-centric or radio-like apps available in Apples app store.  He writes:

... One of the most popular (and fastest growing) application types on iPhones is Pandora and its ilk, including iheart radio, Public Radio and other streaming services. People are getting used to the idea of listening to exactly what they want to hear at any time on their phones. ...

On the other hand, satellite radio is primarily a vehicular listening activity and the iPhone is primarily a two-handed machine.  If you think talking on your cell phone is unsafe, try finding a channel on your iPhone app or restarting the stream when you need to.  But it's just a matter of time -- and not much time in the geological time of radio -- before IP radios are built into dashboards and designed for eyes-on-the-road one-handed adjustments.

Link:  PCWorld.  Thanks to Tom White for the link.  --Dennis

Mix your own public radio podcasts

The elves in NPR's digital media division came up with a great holiday treat for listeners who want public radio on their schedule.  If you go to the NPR podcast directory, you can now make yourself customized podcasts for your iPod or other device from tons of NPR and station programs.

Etan Horowitz of the Orlando Sentinel gives a how to tutorial and Saul Hansell writes a longer article on it talking about implications in the New York Times, Seeing the Future in NPR's Custom News Podcast.  --Dennis

Device storage = irrelevant

I got the following post from my son Andrew (a designer in Providence, RI) on Twitter this morning:

ahaar Just got app for streaming music from home computer to iPhone. Device storage = irrelevant, future = now

That home computer, though, still needs space for music, photos and video.  I just bought an iMac yesterday, mostly for photo editing, and it has a half terabyte drive.  I see that the drive in the latest TiVo is a full TB.  In March 2006 I wrote here that the then 100-GB TiVo hard drive would be 1.6 TB in five ticks of Moore's Law (1 tick = 18 months).  Wrong -- it took only 32 months to get to 1 TB.  Big home storage seems to be a settled thing, but increasingly it looks to me like Andrew is right about the diminished need for mobile storage as long as 3G mobile networks are available.  --Dennis

NPR's Open Content Strategy

I'm very proud of NPR's Open API effort, a sample of which you can see on the left column of this blog.  I believe it will prove to be the single most important web distribution initiative in public media.  One of the architects of this effort, Daniel Jacobson, writes about this in a post at NPR.org, which also has a link to a pdf of his recent presentation on the topic at the recent Business of APIs Conference.  Link:  NPR.org.  For links to other information on the API, click here.  --Dennis

Mobile content

Mobile apps are definitely the most exciting thing going on in the media space right now, so I'm going to try to track some of these things under this headline.

• This morning I'm in Minneapolis and I left the hotel about 7:30 to go to a convenience store.  I noticed 7 or 8 people lined up outside a nearby T-Mobile store.  Hmm, what's going on here, I thought.  Turns out today is the public release of the Google-branded G1 phone.  So, sounds like they have a hit on their hands.  Katherine Boehret tests some G1 apps on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal D Section.
• I've been having problems with getting a "Page Not Found" error when trying to access the tinyurl.com link on NPR's @nprnews Twitter feeds using my Nokia N95.  Worked fine in a regular browser and on my old N82 and other @npr... feeds worked fine.  So they've switched at least one of the RSS feeds that go into @nprnews to bit.ly and that fixed the problem.  The problem related to something about the linked pages not being true permalinks.  The other feeds will move to bit.ly also.  Thanks to Andy Carvin for the fix.  Weird problem.

--Dennis

NPR's Planet Money podcast #2 on iTunes

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the well-deserved nod (link: BuzzMachine) to the journalistic innovation of NPR's Planet Money podcast from  Alex Blumberg, Laura Conaway, Adam Davidson and David Kestenbaum.  It's become must-listening for me and, apparently, for thousands of others because it's now #2 on iTunes podcasting hit parade.  This is particularly significant, because it's doing so without the broadcasting horsepower of Chicago Public Radio/Public Radio International's This American Life (#3) or NPR's Fresh Air (#8), Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me (#11), Talk of the Nation (#16) or Car Talk (#23).  The Planet Money crew is doing a great job of doing what NPR does best -- explaining important but complex things.  I'm grateful both as someone who is vitally interested in their topic and as one of the people they make look good every day.  Thanks to Rob Paterson for the heads up on Jeff's post.  --Dennis

More digital developments at NPR

The best electronic media journalism organization in the country and our stations' nearly 12 billion listener hours each year deserve the best response possible to the challenges of multiple emerging digital platforms.  OK, that's bragging, but true.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about Seven ways to use public radio on your smartphone.  Earlier last month, I posted about NPR's digital distribution strategy.  In early August, we announced that we'd brought Public Interactive to NPR.  July brought NPR's open API announcement (about which see a longer post here and also Todd Mundt's post).

But since "the times, they are a changin'," there's more:

Hibbing, Minnesota's favorite son, Bob Dylan, is giving NPR.org listeners an exclusive one-week free preview of his new two-disc recording, Tell Tale Signs.  Check it out here.

Current notes that NPR hires USA Today editor to run its Digital Media wing.  That would be Kinsey Wilson, who starts later this month with a lot of enthusiasm from myself and our staff (Link:  paidContent.org; Link: NPR press release).

NPR's Dick Meyer writes, NPR Launches Online Community, in his blog.  Check out the post, then check out the new features of NPR Community.  See the  review of it on Ars Technica.

See also Jennifer Dorroh's The Transformation of NPR in American Journalism Review's Oct./Nov. 2008 number.

Finally, check out Anick Jesdanun's NPR boosts online offerings, seeks larger audience for the Associated Press.

Ya think those reports in March that NPR was slowing its commitment to digital may have missed the mark?

Updated 3 October, 2008:
Also, see Chris Snyder's NPR's Digital Evolution: Social Networking, Open API, and Training the Dinosaurs at Wired.com.

And, Sam Churchill's NPR Mobilizes in dailywireless.org:

... NPR management is reimagining the company, and its journalists are learning to reimagine their stories. ¶  NPR has an intense, seven-week training course in multimedia journalism that encouraged reporters to expand their repertoire of reporting and storytelling skills. As of October, NPR will have started or completed the training of about 40 editorial staffers in three groups, and aims to bring the other 410 up to speed in multimedia by next fall. ...

Updated 4 October, 2008:
And, NPR opens the doors on its social network in Zooped.com.

--Dennis

Seven Six ways to use public radio on your smartphone

Updated 19 September 2008:  Forgot to add RSS feeds as #7.

The other day, I took out my Nokia N82 smartphone  (phones that combine cellular, PDA and media functions) while grocery shopping and the slippery thing squirted out of my hand and onto the ceramic tile floor of Harris Teeter, scattering in pieces.  I reassembled it, but there was a big ding in the keyboard plate.  Worse, while I could call out fine, incoming calls worked only about half the time.  I'd been holding out for one of the new Nokia models due out later this year (N85, N96), but it was time for another new mobile phone.  The higher end Nokia phones have a great camera (5 megapixels) and media features (including an FM radio), so I decided to go  with the N95 pictured here.  It has very similar in features to the N82 but has a different form factor, a much better keypad, and the back is coated so it isn't so darn slippery.

I got a late start with my weekend bike riding on Sunday and NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday was already over on WAMU.  So as I often did with the N82 when WAMU's schedule and my life don't coincide, I transported myself to the Pacific Time zone to listen to Northwest Public Radio, where I worked until  early March.  This I did by simply pointing the browser to its Real stream and pedaled away.  Works just fine, although with T-Mobile's non-3G service there is a bit of buffering while in motion.  Note to self: switch to the competition's HSDPA service.

So while I was pedaling, I was thinking about all the ways I use this phone as a radio and "radio surrogate."  Here's my list in declining order of frequency that I use them:

1. [5-6 times per day] The @nprnews feed on Twitter.  If you're not familiar with Twitter, it permits users to follow each other's exploits, those exploits being limited to what you can say in 140 characters.  My postings there are few, but there are as of this writing 208 people following (subscribing to) them.  Some media organizations and bloggers are using Twitter to let people know when a new story is posted elsewhere.  NPR has @nprnews, which comes to my cell phone, and a few others, which I read online.  Since you can embed a link (usually in condensed form using tinyurl.com) in the "tweet" (post), you can follow the link to the online version of the story if you're interested.  One that came tonight reads, nprnews: Calif. Regulators Ban Cell Phone Use By Train Operators http://tinyurl.com/4ro76d.  Several public radio stations also have Twitter feeds that let followers know of news stories as they're posted to the web.
2. [1-2 times per day] Nokia's built-in FM radio for WAMU.  Although the Nokia has usable speakers, you still have to plug in the headset because it's the antenna.  There is a fairly comprehensive and accurate directory of stations.  I use this less often than with the Twitter feed, but for more hours -- while in the gym or walking to/from work.
3. [3-4 times per week] Listen to Northwest Public Radio's Real streams as described in the second paragraph above.  I even listened to it from Iceland in June.  Caution, though -- I've found several station Real streams that don't work on my phone, probably due to streaming rates that are too fast.  Check out publicradiofan.com for links to just about every public radio station in the world, including feeds.
4. [2-3 times per week] NPR's mobile web site, m.npr.org or mobile.npr.org or npr.mobi.  It's just a sparsely formatted version of npr.org featuring selected offerings.   Also lets you get local news from several partnering member stations.  Several public radio stations stations have mobile sites also, including my old one, mobile.nwpr.org.   I just bookmark this in the phone's web browser (same as with NWPR's Real streams).  My NPR phone, a BlackBerry, also has a downloadable shortcut to this (also available for the iPhone) where you can just click an icon and up comes the mobile site.  Even has a link to a number you can call to listen to hourly news updates.
5. [1-2 times per week]  I just visit NPR.org and look for a story that I missed but heard about.  Since it's got text versions, one can get the story that way.
6. [once a month]  I subscribe to a few podcasts, but listen only occasionally to them on the phone.  I also have them on my iPod, and listen there more often in heavy travel months.
7. [once a month or less] Public radio RSS feeds on Bloglines mobile (or your favorite feed reader).  Before March, when I had a life, this was a weekly source of audio, but I've been slacking on my feed reading.  Radio RSS feeds often provide both text and audio versions of a story.  NPR maintains a large list of NPR news, program, topic and member station feeds.  I also use Google Reader on both the Nokia and the BlackBerry.

Nokia uses the Symbian S60 operating system, so these things all work on its N series phones.  Windows Mobile smartphones also carry some or all of these features (many don't have the FM radio -- too bad) but access streams through Windows Media.  Some BlackBerries (not mine) support streaming media also.

It's great to have this media companion along and providing worldwide access to public radio.  Good listening!  --Dennis

T-Mobile and Orange to test 100-channel mobile TV

Richard Wray writes:

T-Mobile and Orange will today announce a partnership to run a commercial trial in west London of a new mobile TV technology which could allow handset users to tune in to up to 100 channels.  ¶  The technology, TDTV, has been developed by US-based NextWave Wireless at its British unit in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and could provide a cheaper and more efficient way to get broadcast TV on to mobile phones. The trial, due to start in late summer, will see several thousand Londoners given either a new handset - made by a far eastern manufacturer rumoured to be LG - or a wireless receiver, no bigger than a matchbox, which will transfer the channels to their mobile phones. ...

Link:  The Guardian.  --Dennis