BY KURT HANSON
Content provider OnRadio, which has until now focused on providing services to radio station websites, is "rewriting its business plan" and about to become an Internet radio broadcaster itself, with a business-to-business focus.

According to OnRadio's VP/Internet Entertainment Division David Bean, the company has already started to get into the business of providing branded radio formats to corporate sites.

Bean told RAIN that OnRadio is currently providing five formats of audio programming (CHR, A/C, modern rock, smooth jazz, and country) to the First USA bank website. (The concept is that the site's visitors can listen to their choice of music while at the site; the stations contain IDs and promos that brand the formats as First USA's.)

OnRadio envisions offering a total of seven or eight formats that could each theoretically be branded for hundreds of clients, Bean said.

OnRadio is also planning to launch its own Internet-only radio stations under the Vibe (R&B), Spin (rock), and Blaze (rap/hiphop) brand names in March, continuing a long-standing relationship that OnRadio has with those firms.

Bean said he is intending to hire radio industry programmers as PDs of the various stations and is currently soliciting resumes.

The privately-held California-based company, headed by CEO Rick Ramirez (see "Who's Who" here), was launched in 1995 under the name Electric Village.

You may recall, if you attended the Fall NAB in Orlando, that OnRadio seemingly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pitching its services to radio broadcasters, including sponsoring what seemed to be a wildly-expensive private party for NAB attendees at Universal Studios Florida.

We must have inspired them -- now they're becoming broadcasters themselves!




Nielsen//NetRatings this week released its estimates of the connection speeds that Internet users in the U.S. use at home to access the Internet.

And although most readers of this newsletter probably feel that a 56K modem is a low-end model, the NetRatings figures suggest that most of the population isn't even there yet, with the majority of consumers using modems at 14.4, 28.8, or 33.6 Kbps speeds.

And only 5.9 percent of home users in the NetRatings sample were accessing the Internet via a high-speed connection, which includes ISDN, T1 lines, satellite, cable modem service and the various types of digital subscriber lines:

(Note: NetRatings estimates that although about 100,000,000 Americans have Internet access at home, only about 73,000,000 (shown above) actually used their Internet access during November.)




From All Access: Sinton, Barnes & Associates have closed its Atlanta-based consultancy after more than a decade. Remarked Tom Barnes, "While the radio and record industry finished its consolidation, we'd hoped to maintain some synergy between the wireless business and our developing Internet one-to-one marketing practice, [but] there were just not enough clients who had the need to see that far into media convergence."

Sinton said, "We were calling on each other less often as the wireless, Internet, and radio businesses faced remarkably different challenges."

Barnes has launched Mediathink.com, focusing on media and Internet client strategies and will continue serving the existing Sinton, Barnes & Associates clients. Barnes can be reached at (404) 307-2799. Meanwhile, Jon Sinton has joined Spectrasite to help migrate them from strictly a cellular provider to broadcasting. Sinton can still be reached at (770) 390-8959.

Read the full piece in All Access's "Net News" column here (registration required).





BY KURT HANSON
Looking for ideas for your website? Here are a couple that you might be able to work with or at least be inspired by -- one from Alice @ 97.3/San Francisco and the other from the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" section of www.abc.com.

Alice, being a CBS/Infinity-owned station, does not stream its audio, of course. However, its website does include a prototype of the new "Now Playing" feature that's being developed by Get Media (which signed an alliance deal with streaming provider INTERVU earlier this week).

On Alice's home page, a Java applet (i.e., a small program) apparently access the station's music logs and displays the current song being played (title, artists, and CD) -- plus the titles of all the songs that were played in the last hour!

Better yet, as you move your cursor over each title, you get to see the cover art for each CD, plus buttons that link to more information on the CD or a opportunity to purchase the CD.

You can see it for yourself at www.radioalice.com (although it apparently wasn't functioning late Thursday night). Since the station doesn't stream, of course, you'll probably have no way of knowing if it's accurate or not.

"Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is the popular culture event of the season -- the new Pokemon -- and its site pretty much lives up to the reputation of the show. It has an amazing amount of good-quality content -- profiles of the winners, a realistic (except for the fact that there's no Regis) version of the game you can play on your computer (pictured below), video clips of emotional moments from past shows, a schedule of upcoming shows, details on how to compete to appear on the show, information on how to get tickets to be in the studio audience, and lots more.

But the specific feature of the site that caught my eye was this: Audio clips (shown below) of four of the show's music themes (plus an audio clip of Regis asking, "So, that's your final answer?").

This is great! You can hit the "Let's Play Theme" link and do a talkover, in your best Regis impersonation: "All right, let's play...'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!'" and if you do it over and over again you can drive your friends and/or family nuts.

This takes me back to my high school days, when I was a loyal WZUU/Milwaukee listener and would have killed to get a clean copy of the top-of-the-hour music bed (and jingle out).

Even in this modern day and age, you may have some loyal fans of your radio station who would enjoy hearing clean copies of your jingles. Why not let them? What's the harm? Post them on your site (and let an advertiser sponsor the page)! And if you're a heritage station, why not post some of your jingles from 10 or 20 years ago?

Perhaps your station is already doing this. If so, please e-mail me here and grab some credit for it. (Or, if you do this in the future, I'd be curious to hear how it goes.)

Have you seen other great website features? Let us know here.




Lots of press pieces have dealt with this topic in the past few days. We'll add links to several of them tomorrow. (Sorry -- this was originally scheduled for today.) Here's one from from CNET News to get you started; please feel free to check back this weekend for more.



Retired Radio Stations Find a Calling Online
Resurrected broadcasters run lean operations on the Web, attracting listeners from all over. They hope advertisers will follow.
"Old radio stations don't die anymore. They just reappear on the Internet. Two radio stations that disappeared from the Los Angeles airwaves--hard-rock KNAC 105.5 FM and techno-dance-oriented Groove Radio 103.1 FM--are being resurrected with 24-hour broadcasts via the World Wide Web..."
Read the full story in today's Los Angeles Times here.

We've made it easy for you! All you have to do is cut-and-paste the following text into your e-mail software, edit the copy any way you like, add any personal observations of your own, and send it to the people in your address book:   There's a new, free, web-based newsletter that I've been reading lately and that I think you might find interesting too. It's called "RAIN: Radio and Internet Newsletter." Published by Strategic Media Research's Kurt Hanson, RAIN is a daily compilation of news stories -- plus essays, commentary, and resources -- designed to help media executives keep on top of issues involving the Internet and its potential impact on radio. RAIN takes a look at the THREATS to radio as we know it today...but also at the many OPPORTUNITIES it offers. It doesn't require any subscription -- just visit www.kurthanson.com. [OPTIONAL: Add any personal observations here.]   So...cut and paste away! And edit it to your liking. And thank you very much for spreading the word. (Hopefully, you're doing your friends a favor, too.) (Please free free to "cc:" me on your e-mail (kurt@kurthanson.com). Then someday if and when I have a drawing for fabulous prizes to thank readers for spreading the word, I'll put your name in the hat.)

Day-trade