Radio's up with the play

By PETER SINCLAIR

For me, radio has been a long and winding road.

I'm even old enough to remember the "crystal set" - home-brew radio, which was still conjuring the faint, tinny ghosts of Bing Crosby and Vera Lynn out of thin air when I was at school in the 1940s, and which has gained a new lease of life on the net in the past decade at sites such as The Crystal Set Society.

In my personal calendar, 2000 marks the 43rd anniversary of what began as a flippant and (I thought) temporary digression into the world of radio.

The long march of years, now slowing to a trudge, has carried me from fortress state broadcasting, the NZBS in 1957, to the almost complete privatisation of today.

And now, just when you might have thought the dear old medium would be getting a bit ho-hum, along comes the brand new phenomenon of digital radio.

This country's most vital online radio presence is CanWest, anchored by Auckland's MoreFM, local pioneer of the trend and deeply committed to expanding it.

Its websites in Wellington and Christchurch, plus the national Channel Z site, radiate the sort of fun and excitement which went with early radio.

bFM was hard on the heels of More and still shows equal commitment. But my, they grow up so fast, don't they? The raucous rebel of yesteryear now offers a "fully stocked corporate box" at the Big Day Out as a Christmas promotion.

I wonder if they make you wear a tie as well?

But these days the most interesting onliner of them all is Digital Broadcasting's Kiwi Channel, which you'll find tucked up with the Concert Programme and other RNZ offerings at Xtra.

Because it's here you realise that there's a war on: the status quo versus the wild blue yonder.

You'll notice a major omission in the list of stations above. Not one belongs to New Zealand's dominant broadcaster, The Radio Network.

On the net, about the only indication that TRN even exists is the fossilised remnant of a site once maintained by Dunedin's Classic Hits. Apart from this forlorn skeleton, nothing. So I rang the network's CEO, Kevin Malone.

Having streamed several radio stations in his native Florida, Mr Malone has a wealth of experience in old and new radio.

"I can't figure out any advantage in streaming my stations online," he says crisply. "How am I going to sell a small, scattered, global audience to local advertisers?"

He adds that only 200 or 300 people can listen to an online radio station at once.

"Also, I have a problem with putting my heavily researched content - my music rotations, liners, sound - up for grabs on the net."

He points out that giant Baltimore-based Infinity Broadcasting will not permit any of its content to be streamed either.

I feel like mentioning that this is also the outfit which has been known to schedule commercial breaks on The Howard Stern Show on WCKG/Chicago which last over 15 minutes and sometimes contain more than 35 commercials in a row, but don't.

DBL's Clinton Murphy and Steve Pulley are definitively new radio. Faced with the hefty costs of an FM licence they decided to stream, and Xtra was happy to take them on trial as a point of difference from other local portals.

Already their Kiwi Music Channel has been joined on Xtra by Power Hits, a Top 40 format, and three more formats, Smooth Jazz, 80s, and 90s Only, will be deployed by Christmas. Others are in the works.

Is anyone listening? "230,000 since our July launch," Mr Pulley says. "Plus there's a lot of loyalty, a lot of 'stickiness;' our TSL has doubled."

That's "time spent listening" - Mr Pulley used to programme i98FM and The Breeze in Auckland, and this is how programmers talk.

As for Mr Malone's limit of a few hundred listeners per online station, he replies that this figure applies only to "unicasting," which is essentially one-to-one broadcasting.

"Multicasting," a one-to-many model like ordinary radio, can theoretically handle almost any number of listeners but requires high-end equipment [routers] not yet in general use on the net.

This is confirmed by John Jansen, the enthused - and enthusing - internet architecture manager of Auckland's More FM and a driving force behind CanWest's colonisation of online radiospace.

He points to Microsoft's streamed discussion of its quarterly earnings report to 13,000 employees as a good example of multicasting - because, appropriately, the technique was first developed as a business application for the New York Stock Exchange's intranet to synchronise the release of stock prices.

He, too, shares a few figures with me. The More site gets about 100,000 visits a month from some 20,000 listeners; Channel Z does even better with 200,000 visits from 70,000. That is a total of around 300,000 visits from 90,000 people a month to those two online stations alone.

"It may not yet equal traditional radio reach," Mr Jansen says, "but it is certainly reach."

His boss, More's Larry Somerville, sums up the difference between "real" radio and streamed radio. "You've got to look at a radio website as a separate and supplementary business. Without phone-calls, for example, interactivity is entirely different.

"There's no money in it right now, but we need the online presence. There are at-work possibilities in the future, but substantial listenership is some way down the track."

Maybe not, with new technologies like Octiv's pre-encoder which can reduce the size of music and video files without affecting quality and works with both Real Networks and Windows Media files, or any other streaming format for that matter.

Meanwhile, Mr Somerville points to ShoppingNZ.com which, with heavy support from his on- and offline stations, offers to propel his advertisers into cyberspace quickly, painlessly and profitably.

As an old radio hand, he knows all about alternative methods of skinning a cat ...

Links:

The Crystal Set Society

MoreFM Auckland

MoreFM Wellington

MoreFM Christchurch

Channel Z

bFM

Digital Broadcasting

Xtra

Dunedin's Classic Hits

Octiv

ShoppingNZ