As the National Association of Broadcasters show convened in Las Vegas this week, I had a chance to talk to Conrad Trautmann, SVP of Operations and Engineering at Westwood One, the largest provider of audio content in the US.
“The broadcast business of the future is all about HD radio, satellite radio, HDTV, audio and video on your mobile phone, wi-fi, wi-max, ipods, Iphones, itunes, podcasts, the list goes on. If you look at all of the above and the buzz at NAB the common theme is of course, digital.”
Ok, so us consumers know all that. What’s the big deal?
Well, they have to worry about sizable investment in IP based broadcast infrastructure, satellites and related modulation and things like “spring sun outages”, “cartchunks”(to attach metadata to wav. files) , “copy splitting” (to allow advertisers to target specific markets in their national campaigns)
In the last couple of years, Westwood has been investing in Media Access Xchange (MAX). They shipped MAX receivers to 2,000 radio stations across the country. The receivers are part of International Datacasting Corp.’s SuperFlex Pro Audio suite of products.
They allow content delivery direct to the affiliate’s automation system - no more ripping CD's or downloading from an ftp site. And authentication to make sure only authorized, in good standing affiliates are getting the content.
That’s the future of consumer content too. Fewer visits to Blockbuster. Fewer Netflix deliveries. Personalized content delivered via IP. And much as we may dread it - “copy splitting” – yes targeted ads.
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