From the MeasureCast press release: "According to a new MeasureCast, Inc./Harris Interactive study, the typical streaming media consumer is a 36-year-old white male who lives in the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, or Oklahoma), has completed some college, and earns between $50,000 and $75,000.

"MeasureCast (a streaming media audience measurement firm) teamed with Harris Interactive (an Internet-based market research company) to conduct the in-depth analysis of the demographic makeup and universe of streaming media consumers.
"The study also reveals that the typical streaming media consumer uses the Internet for at least eight hours a week, and that he is more likely to use broadband technology (T1 lines or DSL) than typical Internet users. However, he is frustrated by today's lack of bandwidth..."

The complete study can be downloaded here...

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In case you haven't seen it yet, there's a very nice article by G. Beato on Internet radio in this month's issue of SPIN magazine.

The piece focuses on the success of Dublab (see RAIN "Internet radio Site of the Day" review here), KNAC.com, and Radiostorm.com; with a few sidebars profiling show hosts from smaller outfits. It's appended by a brief write-up on the Kerbango and Sonicbox appliances, and a really well done guide to Internet radio (complete with hilarious icons). And Kurt Hanson, the publisher of this newsletter, was interviewed for and quoted in the story.

Some excerpts:

RAIN's Kurt Hanson on how Internet radio's "inexpensive start-up/increasing cost for increasing audience" situation is reversed in the broadcast world: "With broadcast radio, you pay millions to get the rights to a license. But once you have a license, it costs the same amount to reach one listener as it does to reach one million."

How Dublab's "building an experience beyond regular radio": "By letting DJs actually choose their own playlists. By programming multiple genres -- hip-hop, dub, drum'n'bass, rare groove, even old surf tunes. By trying to educate listeners about music as well as simply entertaining them."

On online music in the future: "While personal music collections certainly won't disappear, they just won't be necessary any longer. What will be necessary, however, are services that act as filters. Very soon all sorts of entities -- radio stations, websites, music labels, bands, dolphins with MIDI hookups -- are going to want you to access their stream...After all, the whole promise of the Internet, from a marketing perspective, is the relationships it allows artists to establish with their fans...

"What you'll really want, when music is ubiquitous, is not access to your favorite songs so much as access to people who know how to present your favorite songs in ways that you personally find most compelling...you'll probably want access to services that give you less music rather than more of it...you'll want services that deliver more than just music -- like, say, the chance to meet a nice bunch of brand new friends..."

"But, ultimately, as Internet radio develops, corporations will inevitably play a major role, because it takes a relatively large amount of money to stream content to large audiences. But even if much of Internet radio turns into regular radio, the small stations playing cool and different forms of music can never be shut out."

On "community" building: "People have always identified with their favorite radio stations in a way that they don't with, say, their local NBC affiliate. But the Internet lets them take that identification to the next level...Says (KNAC.com Program Director) Long Paul, 'The music may be secondary to the lifestyle.'

"The community KNAC.com has built around the music it plays means the station will have something more to offer..."

Simply click the headline at left to bring up a convenient pop-up form!

From streamingmedia.com: "Dotcast Inc., a Silicon Valley-based company has created technology to take advantage of the unused TV spectrum of broadcasters to create an additional distribution channel for digital content...

"Dotcast is in the process of constructing the Dotcast Digital Network, which they say is based on proprietary technology that enables the insertion of 4.5 Mb/s of data into an existing analog television signal or 10Mb/s of data into a digital television signal without impairing the normal programming signal...

"Dotcast believes that its one-to-many distribution infrastructure will provide rich media content owners with advantages they can't receive through the one-to-one distribution infrastructure of the Internet and broadband.

"An integral part of the Dotcast system, however, is the DotBox receiver device, which will need to be in every home that intends to use the Dotcast network and initially will be connected to a PC...The DotBox will receive content based on preprogrammed preferences, and will include a 100-gigabyte hard drive...

While the DotBox can receive data downstream at rates 100x faster then most DSL connections (4.5Mb/s as compared to 300kp/s), it will only allow you to send information back to the Internet through your normal connection -- which may very well be dial-up...Dotcast projects that commercial rollout of its network will occur in late 2001, following market and technical trials earlier in the year."

Read the entire story here.

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From Wired News: "Those offering news on the Web won -- and they won by a landslide in what may have been the busiest day ever in the short history of the Internet.

"'The numbers were rather astronomical,' said Allen Weiner, a Web traffic analyst at the site-ranking firm Nielsen/Netratings. 'I can't say definitively that it was the biggest traffic of all time, but I damn well can't say what could have bigger.'

"Traffic at news and information sites increased by between 130 and 500 percent during the historically close election, depending on the site, Weiner said.

"ABCNews.com, for example, received 27.1 million pageviews Tuesday, which beat its Starr Report-record of 10 million pageviews...

"Although the news sites had expected Tuesday to be pretty hectic, some of them apparently had no idea that traffic would approach record levels. And it was clear, Tuesday night, that some sites were clearly caught off guard.

'"We saw performance on a lot of news Web sites slip down,' said Daniel Todd, who analyzed election news sites at the Web performance monitoring company Keynote Systems...

"Keynote's Todd said that he expected the traffic to continue. "This isn't the kind of story like a national catastrophe, where you just want facts and that's the end of it," he said. 'This is very complex, and there's a lot of specific information that people want.'"

Read the full story here.

Kurt Hanson is working from the Strategic Media Research offices today. To reach him, please call 312 726-8300 x. 4401, or e-mail him here.

Reprinted from yesterday's issue...
RadioInk.com is reporting that BroadcastAMERICA.com has filed Chapter 11. According to news source, SurferNETWORK.com will merge with the cash-strapped company, and infuse $1 million in cash in an attempt to save the it.

As reported in a "RAIN exclusive" (here), the average radio station webcast streamed in October of 1999 by BroadcastAMERICA.com seemed to have had an AQH audience size, based on a 24-hour broadcast day and rounded to the nearest person, of zero persons, according to Arbitron Infostream ratings.

From the RadioInk.com story: "On Monday November 6, 2000 BroadcastAMERICA.com, Inc. filed a voluntary petition with the court for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code,11 U.S.C.

"On November 7,2000 BroadcastAMERICA.com, Inc. received a letter of intent from SurferNETWORK.com, Inc. whereby the parties would form a New Company and SurferNETWORK.com, Inc. would provide $1M of funding provided certain conditions were met.

"The parties estimate that the new company will need to raise between $4M-$7M by December 1, 2000. This letter of intent states that neither the new company nor SurferNETWORK will assume any liabilities and claims against BroadcastAMERICA."

Read the RadioInk.com story here. Read the SurferNETWORK press release here.

November 12-14	Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) "Broadcasting 2000: On-air / On-line," Calgary
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA,
February 1-4, 2001	RAB 2001. Details coming soon.