James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Learning from China, an internet station returns to FM, and the Wilhelm Scream

James Cridland is Managing Director of media.info, and an Australia-based radio futurologist. He is a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. Find out more or subscribe at http://james.cridland.net

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James Cridland’s articles

• Learning from China – this week’s audio column

United States

• Earlier this week, it didn’t look like Pandora would be bought by SiriusXM. Pandora stock drops as a result. (Later, apparently the deal is back on)
• How NBC News cut video load times to under 3 seconds – removing Flash and shifting to HTML5, as it happens. Surprising they were still using Flash, to be honest.
• The High School Station that Went HD – some smaller stations in the US seeing the benefit of HD Radio
• Station ditches AM, goes internet only, and then… goes back to AM. It turns out that broadcast radio is valued by its audience. Who knew? Apart from every reader of this newsletter…
• Sean Ross looks back at the Early Days of Station Streaming. No mention of Virgin Radio, Europe’s first to stream 24/7, but still a nice nostalgic look back, and a reminder of how far we’ve come.
• Podcast – The Wilhelm Scream – turns out that movie sound producers have a little in-joke they play on each other.

United Kingdom

• Five marketing fallacies that only the blinkered believe
• The law meant LBC (and other UK radio) couldn’t do any election coverage on the day of the election, apart from bland facts. So this normally relatively serious news station focused on something else.

Elsewhere

• Canada: How 80-year-old Radio-Canada, the French-language arm of the CBC, is driving innovation from within
• China: The red “FM” app on a Chinese friend’s mobile? All of Chinese radio in one place – catch-up from the last day, and live radio.
• Canada: iHeartRadio Canada hits 1 million downloads. It’s a shame Bell went their own way with their app rather than join Radioplayer: radio works better when it’s working as one.
• Qatar: Will Qatar close down Al Jazeera to restore Gulf ties, asks CNN. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera media platforms are under cyberattack. I suspect we’ll see more of this as activism goes online.