Tag: Radio and TV

The Five Dollar Station

One of the reasons radio is so good is radio is extremely cheap:

The transmission equipment, costing just over $1, may be the cheapest in the world. But the local people definitely love it. On a balmy morning in India’s northern state of Bihar, young Raghav Mahato gets ready to fire up his home-grown FM radio station. Thousands of villagers, living in a 20km (12 miles) radius of Raghav’s small repair shop and radio station in Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district, tune their $5 radio sets to catch their favourite station.

The real problem radio (and broadcast TV) faces is there are only so many spots on the dial. There is already talk in the US about how switching to digital TV is going cost homeowners masses of money to replace perfectly good TV sets but it is moving ahead in under 3 years:

Manufacturers, broadcasters, cable and satellite companies and accessory developers are rushing to complete the transition to digital high definition before Feb. 17, 2009, the date the U.S. government has set for termination of all analog broadcasts. In January 2008, about a year before the HDTV transition takes place, the analog channels will be auctioned to the highest bidders. Proceeds from the sales are expected to top $10 billion, with $7.3 billion going to the U.S. Treasury. For those who haven’t bought an HDTV set by the 2009 deadline, the government plans to provide $1.5 billion in subsidies to owners of older sets for converter boxes that will transform the digital signals to analog.

All to avoid a crackle or a shadow on the screen and maybe squeeze more onto the broadcast band. But it is to be seen whether the public reception of digital TV will be the same as digital radio. If over the next three years the 20 year promise of convergence gets a little more traction, there may be a significant sector who won’t make the leap. Interesting to note that my favorite media source these days runs on something like 2 bucks a year per listener. Not that far off young Raghav Mahato’s business model.

Friday Chat-A-Rama

Stumped no more. Shoeless Jones left a very wise if brief comment:

There is more to life than the three Bs; beer, baseball and bullshit!

That is true. Friday has become the highlight of the week chez nous for the inexplicable reason (say that like Daffy Duck) of the mere use of bullets rather than posts. As the coffee drips in the pot and soon into the brain I write:

  • The TV ratings for the Winter Olympics are apparently going to be the worst since 1906. It makes sense to me. I have not sat and gawked at the glowing screen and thin folk in lycra once. This weekend we are even going into enemy territory to catch the SLU v. Yale mens hockey game at Canton and then on to Oswego where they may not even have CBC on the cable system. Just Al Michaels. The horror. The horror. He even contextualizes this man to a degree. Fortunately, our hat, illustrated, is doing well:

    “We’ve replenished our stock twice already,” said a frazzled Kristina Panko, a service manager for HBC in Sudbury brought to Turin to work the B.C. House branch. “The hat’s so popular because it’s such an obvious symbol of Canada. But even at home, when I called the other day, they told me the stores had sold out.” The trapper hat is the “it” item of jock – and pseudo-jock – apparel in Turin. “It’s the trendy item of the Games,” said Curtis Runions, a 27-year-old native of Kingston, Ont., who has come to town from England, where he’s a high school teacher, to watch some hockey. “Maybe the fad will pass, like it did with the newsboy hats in Nagano, when everybody had one. But right now it’s the thing to have.”

    More sports of all kinds on Deadspin, my new joke-stealing source.

  • It is also true about Fridays. Friday used to be a statistical dead zone and I could never figure out why there would be an 80% drop in activity. Given that bots never sleep, this was weird as I would ahve though Friday was the idlest day of all. Not for me…others…that’s it. And there have been other shifts in the stats. I used to get up to 12,000 visits a day from 1,600 to 2,000 visitors. Now I get 7,500 visits from 2,000 to 2,500 visitors. I have no idea what it means. I have heard a few references to last August (when GX40 numbers hit a peak) as the top month for others. Maybe that was the crest of the blogosphere. Just a few comments to 50,000, by the way.
  • On the three Bs mentioned above, there is lots of stuff that never gets written down here that falls into the categories of family and work. I think that it is prudent but also I generally like to make up stuff so that no one can really call me out on any particular fact. So while I try to write daily, it is not as fact based as, say, John Gushue’s excellent Dot Dot Dot, as excellent a radio reference as there ever was.
  • I am as state pro-bureaucracy as they come in the sense I am not a knee-jerker against public money going to public needs through public service. [Ed.: Yes, I know…how did we ever get the class “D” bloggers license?] I believed this consistently when I was in the self-aggrandizing private sector. Yet…there is this thing called the CRTC and I have learned, if this is possible, to love them less this morning:

    The CRTC said yesterday that Canadian telephone customers have been overbilled to the tune of $652.7-million over the past few years, but the money will not be going back to them. The federal regulator ruled instead that telecommunications companies such as Bell Canada and Telus Corp. should use most of the money — equivalent to about $50 a customer — to expand offerings in underserved markets, primarily rural and remote communities.

    I want my fifty bucks, please. MY fifty bucks.

  • I like Jean Charest. I think he is going to go to junior partner in a 2 person caucus in 1993 to one of the great players in whatever changes are going to occur in Canada. Note this in the Globe:

    In the recent election campaign, Mr. Harper promised Canadians that he would work with the premiers to develop a guarantee on patient waiting times ensuring that Canadians receive essential treatment within clinically acceptable time frames. The cost of the pledge, said Mr. Harper, would have to be borne by the provinces under former prime minister Paul Martin’s $41-billion, 10-year plan for health care, signed in 2004. Yesterday, however, the Quebec Premier made it clear that he doesn’t expect to pick up the cost of his provincial program on his own. The gauntlet now dropped, Mr. Harper will have to decide whether to modify his promise and help pay for the program, or bite the bullet and disappoint Quebec, and probably other provinces, too.

    Good job. We all didn’t sign up for Team Stevie. 63.5% didn’t. I think we are going to look to the premiers as much as the opposition in the House to hold them to account.

There. That is a start. Chat dammit chat.

NPR Expansion

Rob, who drew me into this gig of his as a volunteer, points out a very interesting phenomena: NPR is expanding:

While many newsrooms are shedding reporters—from the New York Times to the Dallas Morning News—NPR is one of the few places an experienced journalist can hope to get a job.
“I wouldn’t call it a binge,” says Bill Marimow, himself a former denizen of the print world. Fired from the Baltimore Sun in 2004, Marimow went to NPR and this week took over as its news chief. “I would call it significant growth.”

The NPR news operation has added 50 journalists in the past three years, raising the total from 350 to 400. Ten years ago NPR had six foreign bureaus; it just opened its 16th, in Shanghai, putting it in the running with major national news organizations. The New York Times and CNN both have 26, the Los Angeles Times has 22, the Washington Post has 19.

It is no secret that I love NPR and, frankly, I wish Canada had its own version that was more closely connected to the listener and viewer than the CBC is. For all the big yap about how the main stream media is bowing to losers like me who type in their pajamas and pretend (to the embarassment of our spouses) we are Edward R. Murrow reporting from the blitz…that is simply not what is occurring. We are watching re-ordering of news media not collapse.

Nothing new. It is part of the same phenomena that same the rise of talk-radio including political talk radio in the US. When I sketched out my seminal but now dust-coated plan for the left in North America, the first thing I thought of was taking back a solid part of the media. I am doing my part but apparently the $200 million gift to NPR from the estate of a nice person called Joan Kroc is being the NPR news boom. What good folk who want objective thorough news reporting (professional unbiased news being a classic progressive or liberal goal just as much as a cheap quality and broadly available education) need to do is put their money where their mouths are.

Others have proven this works. This is just the same as the US right realized it needed to do something and fund something somewhere back in the 60s, achieved break-through in the 80s and achieving inordinate dominance in the last decade. Just as with that shift, the change that NPR is part of is not a single path. Remember how many foretold the demise of Air America during its first days? Well, it is still there and has 89 stations. What we are watching in the reshuffle is an enrichment of news sources, just in the same way that broadcast shortwave radio provided and then cable TV again provided before the internet. The strengthening of NPR is one compliment to the strenghtening of talk-radio of all sorts along with pajamastan and the next new thing that we have not even heard of yet. More voices please.

Dang!

I wasn’t paying attention and I’ve already missed the pre-pre-game show for Super Bowl Extra Large. I hope the pre-warm-up-show is still on the other channel.

Predictions? The team I pick will lose. That makes it Pittsburg. Jerome Bettis, however, will win MVP for guys with guts everywhere. My newly discovered but slowly loading pal Deadspin has a post on what you might watch on TV other than the Super Bowl this evening.

Off To Canton

Off to do my part for NPR by helping NCPR think about what it might do with the internet. I am really looking forward to this but I am a bit worried about my Cantonese.

On the up side, I have established where the ales are, have scoped out First Prize Hots for the way home and also plan to buy some tickets for the big game against Yale on the 20th. It has been two years since we were there for a game.

Trucks On Sand Dunes


From Dirk von Zitzewitz’s Blog and Dakar 2005.

It is that week again and the channel formerly known as the Outdoor Life Network is playing the Lisbon to Dakar rally as a four night summary. Apparently on Saturday there is a four hour repeat broadcast starting 2 pm, a festival of broken drive trains and motorcycles flying mid-air into jagged rock faces.

Last year I promised myself to take this on by moped. This year I renew that pledge for 2007 but with sidecar mopeds. Vintage experimental Italian ones.

Canadian Satellite Radio

As you all know all too well, I am a radio nerd. I was a member of the Radio Prague Listeners Club, have received reception report confirmation cards from many nations, held a trans-Atlantic reception record for a while when I heard local East German radio in my old Nova Scotian home, listen through buzzing and clicking interference on poor reception nights to catch a moment of Steve Somers of WFAN and shared with you my joy at hearing California from eastern Lake Ontario a year and a half ago.

I have radio nerd cred and, though I am not hardcore, I would think that I would be the guy that satellite radio is aimed at. But when I have a look at what Sirius Canada is offering – now that the CRTC mandated puritanical technology delay is almost ready to be lifted – I just don’t know. I have a computer at home and one at work. Both play a bazillion stations and even some amateur nutcases making really bad radio to bring down the man, being in this case the corporate structure of global media, with their iPod (charmingly unaware of the irony all others see given that iPod is todays jewel in the crown of a corporate communication empire.) And yes, I have a bitchin’ Sony 2010 which has healed itself nicely which is my real window on the world. Plus I have a car with that wonder of wonders an AM/FM radio with which I can enjoy the exciting exploration of the unknown as I travel.

So what does paying $14.95 plus tax to get a subscription to Sirius Canada get me? Is it just that it will be the same wherever you are? How dull and dulling. More stardardized delocalized Omnitopian fare. Are you planning to sign on? Is anyone?