Robin Gehl of Cincinnati Public Radio, talked about the station’s recent expansion of service through HD Radio – 2 new channels of service: Jazz and a partnership with WOXY.com. Jennifer Ferro of KCRW detailed some of KCRW’s internet strategy, from the web platform to its streaming and on-demand options. And Jon McTaggart of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media spoke about APM’s strategic approach to broadcast and non-broadcast channels.

McTaggart talked briefly about the three legs of a tripod that will support APM and help it sustain itself: broadcasting – anything related to radio; new media – any service delivered to an IP-enabled device; and face-to-face engagement with the audience. Each has to be treated differently: new media can’t be treated like it’s a broadcast channel. McTaggart says APM takes a generational view when planning and developing its services.

He also offered a list of seven questions that he says he asks when APM is faced with an opportunity, whether it’s a new platform or a new station.

McTaggart’s Seven Questions of Effective Audience Planning

• Who do you want to serve?
• Why do you want to serve this audience? What’s your motivation? strategy?
• What do you know about them? – describe the target individual, give them a name
• What do they know about you?
• How many ways do you reach and serve them?
• What response do you want or expect from them? Do you want them to consume the product? What revenue do you expect from them?
• How will you know that you are succeeding with this audience?

Speaking only for myself, I’ve looked at a number of opportunities in the past few years, and have asked – at best – only one of those questions. This is one of the big take-aways from the conference.

1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email. 

2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production. 

3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.

The name? That’s from Doc Searls.

from Lost Remote.

Rolling out entire program schedules as VOD offering wouldn’t mean the end of “live” television; but if this massive commitment to VOD becomes a reality, it means public television is going to have to think about VOD’s perhaps marginal impact on viewership and on-air fundraising, and – more important – the greater potential to leverage its program assets to create revenue streams, perhaps with premium offerings in addition to free content, or the creation of more “event” specials for purchase or as “pledge events” of sorts for VOD viewers.

Terry Heaton writes today that local stations are eerily silent about this – perhaps because many of them have no idea that their business model may partially collapse around them.

To paraphrase Umair Haque, when your core competency is crumbling, look to build edge competencies. For an industry accustomed to exploiting artificial scarcity, that means understanding the value chain where abundance exists. Smart aggregators help people sort and filter (themselves) in the midst of that abundance, and that’s where local media companies are missing the boat.

That means moving from the supply side of the on-demand world to the demand side. Counterintuitive? Yes, but that describes just about everything in the media 2.0 paradigm.

So if you’re an affiliate, and you’re thinking that sharing download and ad revenues with your network is the road to profitability, ask yourself this. Can I make more money as a pure content provider or as a company that helps people sort, filter and use all that content? Think about it.

“… I think we’re approaching a world in which a near-live media distribution environment will be a major partner to broadcast TV within five-ten years. This environment will be focused on show-by-show subscriptions and ultimate personalisation to get stuff down to viewers over normal broadband and mediated by the bog-standard boring old internet – probably even through the web. And it’s my suspicion that there may only be enough room for five or six major (partially democratised) distribution hubs (at a complete guess as mentioned in the above post: Amazon, AOL, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google). The group that’s going to have the most trouble with this is the public sector broadcasters – they need to be trying to work out how to influence and work with that environment and find a space for free or publically supported content as soon as is bloody possible, rather than trying to develop their own necessarily prescribed and undersupported media distribution platforms. …”