Radio as a local medium is all but dead. Yes some huge markets will survive but say goodbye to local personalities. Too bad. R.I.P. markets 100 plus.
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Another Round Of Layoffs At iHeartMedia
- Thread starter Y2kTheNewOldies
- Start date
It depends. Here's a link to a station in market #110. All local personalities. They just won CMA Small Market Station of the Year:
https://kicks99.com/
It's not owned by iHeart.
Of course there will be exceptions. I was speaking generally.
I recently bought a new car that is offering SXM for a 3 month trial. I must say I am impressed. So many formats that don’t exist in my 300k market. Plus they are using technology to take you to the start of a song whenever you change channels. Not sure how they do that! But there is so much variety without commercials I probably will subscribe after my trial.
Is your new car a GM vehicle?
Kelly it is a Toyota.
I just bought a 2020 Nissan Sentra and noticed the same thing about the SXM unit. If I go to listen online, it will also pick back up from roughly where I left off in the car.
If SiriusXM will give me a deal similar to the one I have in my other car (which I bought off my ex when she moved back to Europe), I'll renew. I won’t, however, pay $20/month for it. If they'll only let me have it in one car, I'll keep it in the older one. It has fewer entertainment options (though I did put a cigarette lighter Bluetooth adapter in), and streaming SiriusXM is still an option with Apple CarPlay. I have to admit, though, that CarPlay is a lot clunkier than I thought it would be. It’s been pretty frustrating to use. Bluetooth and voice commands are a lot easier of a combo than CarPlay and the apps.
I'm also really happy with the safety features the car has. Last night, I was pulling into a parking spot only to find the car next to me was double parked. I put the car in reverse and started backing out not realizing a kid (college aged) had run behind me. The car immediately grinded to a halt, and I sat there for a minute just thinking I’d have probably killed the poor kid if I'd been driving my older car!
Not to turn this into an auto thread, but yes new cars today all have sensors (perhaps ramping up to self driving vehicles). The one sensor I am not sure about is the cruise control automatic slowing if you get too close to a vehicle ahead of you. That is a bit too auto pilot for my taste!
I've driven a lot of them (I'm also an automotive journalist) and actually miss them when a car isn't equipped with them (which is fairly rare).
The first one I drove was 12 years ago and it had issues. I was coming up to a curve on a four-lane highway in the left lane. A semi was in the right lane, about 10 carlengths ahead and got into the curve. The radar cruise control read it as an obstacle and slammed on the brakes at 70 mph with traffic behind me. No crash, but pretty scary.
Now, they marry the cruise with GPS info and account for the shape of the road.
My advice, if you do give it a try---set it for the greatest distance between you and the vehicle ahead, and at the moment you're not comfortable with its response, take over. I always keep my foot near the brake. There've only been a couple of times (in literally hundreds of vehicles over the last decade), I've felt like I would have braked sooner than the system was, and I intervened.
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Reason for asking, is SXM was working with GM on a new product that would allow the vehicle to select between SXM live streams, terrestrial, or satellite seamlessly. A consumer would have access to Pandora and all the other SXM streams without having to do a thing to their radio.
I am still mystified how when I change channels it takes me to the exact start of a song. I guess the tech is so good today they can do it somehow. I don’t get it but it is a nice feature.
The way it's done is the song isn't playing out live, but is being cached-into memory chunks within your radio.
Is this only being done on music channels? The new radios don't take newscasts, talk shows or sports broadcasts back to the beginning, do they?
I suppose they could be taken back to the first commercial break, or the end of the preceding program, whichever came most recently. That would be a nice feature for a top-of-the-hour newscast, but as a sports fan, I'm not sure how I'd react if the baseball game in progress I had selected was actually bases loaded, two out, but I was taken back to the very start of the inning.
Does this catch up with the live feed at some point or does the entire feed continue to be behind by whatever number of seconds or minutes?
It plays out in the order started. For example; live the song started 42 seconds prior to you tuning in. That means you're hearing 42 seconds of delay for the entire stream. Keep in mind though, there is always additional delay from the satellite and the fact that all the SXM music shows are voicetracked and played via a server, so "live" is a never a thing.
The average listener doesn't know that there's a chance the DJ on their local station isn't sitting in a local studio. I also don't think they care. Some don't even know the difference between local and national programming. I kid you not. Back 17 years ago I was involved at a small AM station. We carried the Dr. Laura show. One lady whom I worked with at my real job was a fan of Dr. Laura. Her mind was blown when I told her Dr. Laura was sitting in a studio somewhere in the Los Angeles area and not sitting at the local radio station's studio in Plantsville, Connecticut.
Co-worker: So tell me. What's Dr. Laura like in real life?
Me: I don't know. I've never met the woman.
Co-worker: But didn't you tell me you work at AM 990?
Me: I do.
Co-worker: So Dr. Laura is on AM 990. You work at AM 990, how can you not have met her?
Me: Dr. Laura is based at a radio station in Los Angeles. We pick her show up via a satellite dish we have at our studio in Plantsville.
Co-worker: Really? You mean Dr. Laura isn't sitting in your studio in Plantsville?
Me: I swear on it. If the radio station can't even afford to pay me, how can you believe they can afford to pay Dr. Laura's salary?
Co-worker: You don't have "Dr." in front of your name and that's why the station can't afford to pay you.
TV stations have put up with the same sort of thing. Decades ago, there would be angry people who would call their local station and demand to talk to Walter Cronkite...and more recently thinking that Oprah lived in their small town.
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