BlogSat

I'm a big fan of BBC radio . I used to listen to the online stream religiously for a while. I learnt two things today this week about the BBC that made me smile They have an incredibly ambitious Web 2.0 program (slightly negative tone to the paidcontent post though.) Given how much news tend to be over-sensationalized and needlessly analyzed today, I think its kinda cool that in 1948, the BBC radio broadcast said "There is no news today - goodnight." I can't find the link to the Economist opinion piece where I read it, but this a pretty funny spoof instead.:) They're responsible for the first three seasons of Coupling . Season Four was good, but... New ChiBus article out this week as well. Wrote it in a terrible rush, but it was the most fun I've had writing an article in a while.

I learnt something cool about the way the economics of Internet Radio work today. Too bad the entire industry had to get into danger ( BusinessWeek link) for me to get a chance to read about it. I picked it up at GigaOM , and then BlogMaverick (the one remaining concern I have about the Dallas Mavericks :)). So here's the super-distilled version without the actual numbers: The entity that sets the royalty rates for streaming songs is the Copyright Royalty Board (which represents those much loved people: the RIAA ). It upped the royalty rate from $0.0008 per performance to $0.0011 per performance this year, rising all the way to $0.0019 in 2010. The upshot is, given listening patterns and current subscription rates, (or rates available for ads served) there is just no way most streaming Internet radio sites are going to be able to stay in business. This obviously hurts the smaller stations the most, especially since they lost the option of paying as a percentage of revenue (and ...