Note To Neilsen: KRMG and KTOK Have All the Listeners They Want!

[woodyrr]

I am not a radio guy. I’m at the other end of the wire that comes out of the back of that Electro Voice RE20.

Last Thursday, I was working in Norman and had an almost unreadable KRMG signal on my walkman radio. I decided to listen using Wunderradio on my iPhone, but when I tried to load the KRMG stream, it wouldn’t load. Thinking I had a poor signal, I tried KTOK with the same result. The help screen informed me that KTOK no longer worked because Clear Channel has developed it’s own iPhone application exclusively for CC streams (not gonna happen guys ). To solve the KRMG problem, I searched Wunderradio for other stations streaming the Boortz show and listened to WSB in Atlanta. Later, I sent a bug report to Wunderradio about KRMG and got an almost immediate response telling me, to my amazement, that the stream was no longer available!

I have heard the phrase “doubling down on stupid” often recently and I think that I now know what it means. What is the deal with radio stations ignoring potential listeners by withholding their programming (and their commercials) from portable devices like the iPhone. I understand that even Sirius/XM is developing an iPhone application that will allow subscribers to access programming. Radio out of a single stick is well and good, but radio out of every cellular stick in the world seems like a good plan as well. I don’t think having a Clear Channel application and a Cox application and . . . is a very smart idea either. I wonder what Bob Hurley Ford and Joe Marina Honda or the New Balance Store would think knowing that people who would otherwise be listening to KRMG are instead, out of necessity, listening to commercials for a Ford dealer in Atlanta. It just doesn’t make sense.

[OKCRadioGuy]

Look for ooTunes in the app store.  I just pulled up both streams and they worked.  Look under Tulsa...

[NightAire]

Radio's in a tough way when it comes to the internet; as you pointed out, they can't NOT be available to their audience.

At the same time, they don't want to pay the bandwidth bill to stream to listeners in Lithuania who is most certainly out of the 6-county survey area & isn't likely cared about by Bob Hurley Ford and Joe Marina Honda or the New Balance Store.

I don't have a good answer to this one.  Do you limit your listening audience to a certain set of cell towers & zip codes & risk ticking off people on vacation, transplants to or from the market, & possibly an out of state owner of a local business, or do you open it all up & risk building an (expensive) fan club in Germany?

I've had this discussion with a station owner.  It's not an easy decision to make.

Thankfully, so far most stations are at the least leaving themselves open to the continental U.S., & I think most are globally available.

Another problem arises when you realize these stations are trying to pay for their streams often with banner ads and pre-stream video ads.  Trying to pull this in over a cell phone can easily break the system, either leaving them without the revenue to pay for your stream or you without the stream.

As a cell phone listener you are on the bleeding edge of technology.  Which I applaud!  If I had my way, internet radio would be factory-standard in every vehicle rolling off the assembly line next year.  (There may not be too many, so that might not be too hard to accomplish.  *rim shot*)

However, as a trail-blazer, you'll need to keep in mind there may be a few hiccups along the way, or the occasional app you'll need to download to make your phone & the internet streams "play nice."  Normally these apps will only help you listen, not spam you or anything weird like that.  I hope you'll give them a shot.

Some day, internet radio will be standard everywhere, & our grandkids will ask, "did you REALLY lose the signal when you left town?"   

In the meantime, stations continue to work to make themselves available wherever & however they can...  and, sometimes, it's not all smooth sailing.  Hang in there, & keep trying!

[woodyrr]

Thanks for the information.

I don't know how any of this actually works, but I know that when I first downloaded the application, KRMG, KTOK, KMGL (Magic 104.1 OKC), Mix 96 (Tulsa) and KAAM (Dallas) were the stations that I was interested in listening to and all were available. Today, Wunderradio tell me that Clear Channel (KTOK) has asked them to remove all CC streams from their list of available stations, and for reasons not explained, KRMG is no longer available, and those, especially KRMG are the two I depend on most.

The bottom line is that I work alone and I like listening to the radio while I'm working. I'm on the fringe of technology out of necessity rather than choice. I see devices like the iPhone as the wave of the future. In addition to audio (iTunes, podcasts, and radio streams), I have an application from amazon.com that allows me to download and read Kindle ebooks anywhere I am. Removing streams that were previously available while they work out the details seems to be the wrong approach. Maybe they could come up with a radio stream clearing house, like iTunes or amazon.com (which is where I prefer to buy my mp3s) that could offer subscriptions to feeds, but it would have to be at a very reasonable fee (like the mp3s). I have XM and it costs me over 250.00 a year for 2 radios which for me is tolerable for now, but not indefinitely. Until some bright ten year old comes up with a plan, at least with syndicated programming, there are other stations like WSB that are streaming to the iPhone.

I will have to think before purchasing ooTunes. I have no assurance that Clear Channel stations and KRMG won't be pulled from it in the near future as well.

I realize that radio stations are having a tough time of it, but for the listener, I see these as the best of times. Gone are the days when one has to pick one of the few local stations and make the best of it. If I want to listen to Boortz, I find Boortz and listen. If someone else is partial to music played on the Theremin, I'll bet there's a station for that. I'd just rather see the opportunities for choice expanded rather than contracted. As NightAire says, we just have to figure out a way to pay for it.

[Matt Bradley]

KRMG's stream will return.

[OKCRadioGuy]

Unfortunatly radio companies in general are very backwards in their thinking.  Instead of trying to work towards getting the most listenership regardless ofthe type of signal they worry about control. They lost that control years ago, similar to the other relic industry called the record company.  Radio needs to pull it's head out of it's butt soon or it will be too late.  We are content providers.  Pay the costs and move on.        They should fight the record jerks for their rape-tax with all guns blaring but pure streaming costs are insignificant.  It's all the other leachs that need to be controlled before it ruins us.

[Bryan Pennington]

I will have to think before purchasing ooTunes. I have no assurance that Clear Channel stations and KRMG won't be pulled from it in the near future as well.

ooTunes costs $4. That's the real answer to your question. Frankly it seems like a pretty small gamble to me if you enjoy radio that much.

Have you looked around the podcast section of iTunes? You might find something there you like as much or more than the live stuff you hear on KRMG. It might be a day or so behind, but it'll have fewer or no commercials!

Terrestrial radio will kill itself and probably sooner than later. I bet I haven't listend to an hour of live radio since I got an iPhone and plugged it into my car stereo three months ago.

Bryan

[OKCRadioGuy]

Terrestial radio is sort of safe as long as carriers are like ATT.  They have so many holes in metro coverage it's like swiss cheeze.  No less than 4 times I have to reach over and restart a stream on my phone that I want to listen to while driving across the ends of the metro.  Some day it will be better one hopes, but to say that the public is going to just dump terrestrial 100 percent and go to a phone isn't totally practical right now in most cases.

[Bryan Pennington]

I didn't mean to say that the signals would go away real soon...just that when radio does die the industry will have done it to itself. 

Bryan

[woodyrr]

Well, I was in Norman again today so I downloaded ooTunes. I was able to listen to . . . . . . .  . . the KRMG stream OK but . . . . . . . . the problem that I . . . . . . . . . had was that it would . . . . . . . . . play and then stop, play and . . . . . . . . . . . then stop. Finally, it would just jump and skip over some programming. I suspect that is because I have a first generation iPhone and have to rely on the edge network. I get a continuous stream on the wifi network at home, but I get a good RF signal as well. It was a bit frustrating, but it was much better than the “noise to signal” ratio that I get over the air down there. Streaming radio to mobile devices has a long way to go it seems.

Can somebody tell me what happened to the Boortz information overload hour today? They were going to have an hour-long confab with Jamie Dupree among others. I switch to KTOK at eleven, then back to KRMG at twelve or so, and finally pick up the last hour of Boortz from KOKC. The interview with Jamie Dupree in the final hour sounded exactly like the one in the first nationwide hour and there wasn’t a group discussion. Catching the final hour from some station in San Francisco yielded the same result.