Viacom Launches Podcast-Only Radio Station

prostoalex writes "Figuring out it couldn't get any worse, Viacom is turning an underperforming talk radio station in San Francisco into podcasting central. KYOU Radio performed so poorly in the ratings that it would not even show up on the official Arbitron radio rankings for the city of San Francisco. Now the Web site of the station owned by $56.5 billion corporation features a hip young look and claims to be the Open Source Radio. Visitors can upload the podcasts of their own in MP3, AIFF, AVI or WMA formats (no OGG support by someone who's so accepting of open source)."

Comments

Good idea

[katana]

Radio that's just as good as your local public-access TV channels. Won't that be awesome.

Re:Good idea

[lowid (24) _________]

I personally would like for this to mean the return of old-timey radio dramas. After all, I can't imagine that this would ever be done by anyone other than amateurs. Our local college radio station has something similar to a radio drama (although it's a bit more of a narrative) every monday night, and it's actually quite enjoyable.

Not a bad idea

[HELLO.JPG]

From a business perspective this is genius. Content costs nothing because it's created by users and everything they make is pure profit. People will tune in to see if their content was picked or not.

Of course, it will probably end up being just as crappy as local public access channels. Except, instead of seeing teenagers prank call McDonald's it'll be wannabe Art Bells ranting about how George W. Bush is hiding Osama bin Laden on the dark side of the moon.

OK, you're crazy

[Schlemphfer]

Call me crazy, but I fail to see what all the hubbub is about podcasting (I also dislike the name). I think it is kind of neat as an idea, but I just don't see any financial strategy behind this that is in anyway sustainable. This isn't meant to be flamebait, I am really curious.

Please take the sentence above and insert "the web" where "podcasting" is currently placed. You could say much the same thing about the web lacking a financial strategy for content-oriented sites, especially back in 1999. But it evolved, at least somewhat. The same thing will happen to podcasts.

Of greater importance, though, is that something can be totally paradigm-shifting but not generate a lot of cash. If 20 million people soon do most of their "radio" listening by podcast, the implications to society are enormous regardless of how much money is being made.