RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter

From BusinessWire: "Lightningcast, Inc. today announced that Karl Spangenberg has been appointed as president and chief executive officer.

"Prior to today's appointment, Spangenberg served as president and chief operating officer of @plan based in Stamford, Connecticut. During his tenure, Spangenberg was instrumental in guiding and developing the company to become the industry research standard among online agencies and ad-supported Websites for buying and selling Web advertising...

"Spangenberg will assume president and CEO responsibilities from Tom Des Jardins, who will continue to serve as Lightningcast's board chairman and CTO. Prior to @plan, Spangenberg was vice president of worldwide advertising and an officer of Infoseek Corporation...

"Lightningcast recently completed a second round of funding led by Nokia Venture Partners totaling $15.5 million. This follows an initial round of funding last March from Redleaf Group and Birchmere Ventures totaling $4.7 million."

Read the press release here.

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From the Wall Street Journal: "Supertracks, a start-up forced to give up its first digital music initiative, is

proposing a way to slash the costs of Internet broadcasting.

"The Portland, Oregon company Tuesday will announce a technology that transfers a large selection of music to computer users’ hard drives, allowing them to listen to it later in the order arranged by a radio station or other programmers. Supertracks’ system includes software that prevents users from changing that

order or sharing song files with others, as users do on Napster Inc. or other music-download services...

"Supertracks estimates that a computer user who listens 1.5 hours a day can cost the (streaming) broadcaster $81 annually for music of relatively high quality. And many users are listening to many more hours, running up much higher costs. The company says broadcasters that adopt its alternative system, called Bridgeport, would cap their annual costs at about $15 a user, no matter what the listening time.

"That comparison assumes an initial collection of about 400 song tracks and about 100 new tracks swapped out per month. Much of the communications savings is based on the fact that many radio stations repeat the same songs; with streaming, those songs must be sent to each user over and over, while they only arrive once with Bridgeport. Another benefit is that users can listen to music when they aren’t connected to the Internet."

Read the Wall Street Journal article at MSNBC.com here.

This new product offering represents a change in business model for Supertracks. Up until now, the company focused on developing secure delivery systems for downloading music. The product is being tested by Paul Allen's Portland, Oregon Urban station Jammin 95.5.

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The Jam Player is quite reminiscent of ClickRadio (see RAIN's review here and here), in that it's designed to avoid the pitfalls of streaming by "caching" the audio on the user's hard drive. It also reminds us of Binary Broadcasting's project (RAIN coverage here), as it is marketed to broadcast stations as a way to extend their brand online other than simply streaming the on-air signal, and offer user-customization.

The main drawback to it catching on (besides the fact that it's using 800 Mb of storage on the user's hard drive) is simply the "ramp up" to get to the music. The user has to fill in a registration form, download the software, and install it -- that is, if he or she already has Windows Media 7. If not, that software needs to be downloaded and installed as well.

That accomplished, music has to be downloaded -- which can take literally hours, depending upon the user's connection. Subsequent music downloads should occur at a preset time (when it's presumably most convenient for the user), but in our initial tests, it seemed to need to reconnect for more music every few minutes.

Seems as the amount of time between finding the application and actually hearing music may be too much of an opportunity to go elsewhere than your average user can resist.

Also, though it seems they plan to eventually use the application for branding and promotional purposes, and to run additional, targeted ad inventory, we heard only music and occasional sweepers.

Yet, the station testing the app is owned by one Paul Allen, who I believe has had a modicum of success in the software business (he's cofounder of Microsoft). -- PM --
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From Salon: "If Microsoft had its way, which it usually does, it would be dominating the streaming-audio and

streaming-video software market with typical ruthless efficiency. Over the past decade, Microsoft has littered its path to world domination with the corpses of countless competitors; a little company named Netscape comes to mind. But when the subject is streaming media -- seen by many observers as one of the big growth areas of the broadband Internet future -- Microsoft is stumbling far, far behind the market leader, RealNetworks...

"More to the point is the fact that the fight over streaming video is taking place on a different battleground

than the fight over the Web browser or other popular applications, like word processing or spreadsheets. It's not desktops that are at issue but Internet servers, those Net-connected computers that host the audio and visual content streamed out to users. Microsoft...doesn't control the server market -- and because of that fact, many Net citizens can breathe a sigh of relief.

For whoever controls the servers controls a massive portion of the Net's core infrastructure. And if Microsoft gained that power, then the company really could do anything it wanted.

"Right now, no one controls the server market -- Sun Solaris, IBM, Windows NT, Linux, FreeBSD and even Apple are all major players. The key to RealNetworks' success, in large part, is understanding this heterogeneity and adapting to it, rather than attempting, à la Microsoft, to do the opposite and make the Net conform to Gates and Co.'s wishes."

Read the entire story in Salon here.

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From Mformobile.com: "Genie, one of the UK's leading mobile Internet services, have announced a deal with MTV to provide content on its multi-access web and WAP portal...

"Clearly, TV and video production will become a critical component as the 3G market unfolds in Europe -- the

streaming capabilities are yet to be proven, but MTV is confident that, via Genie, it will deliver a high-quality and 'truly addictive mobile service.' The quality remains to be seen, but as for MTV being addictive, well..."

Read the entire story here.


February 21-25, 2001	The Gavin Seminar 2001, Miami, FL
February 26-28, 2001	Broadcasters Website Sales Conf. 2.0, Tempe, AZ

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Try it out! Explore the wide world of Internet audio by clicking the screenshot above.