Ok, so I was reading this interview with the Spotify CEO. Don’t let the headline fool you, he talks about way more than Apple.
Here is the part that caught my attention.
McCarthy pitched for freemium streaming to kill broadcast radio. “The 20-year trend here is linear dies, everything on-demand wins. Instead of free / paid, it’s paid plus free, and free eats broadcast radio… I don’t know what happens to news and I don’t know what happens to sports, but for sure, the combination of your phone plus a voice-activated interface enables the car, and the car is the principal user experience for broadcast radio. Broadcast radio, SiriusXM are extremely threatened by the growth and evolution of streaming services.” He later described streaming as an “existential threat” to SiriusXM.
What if we made our own sports radio show. The local wahoos calling in and complaining about their team. The works.
Except instead of being on the terrestrial radio, it’s live on Twitch/YouTube.
And instead of talking about sports, we talk about nerdy shit.
Hear any nazis get through on terrestrial radio call-in shows? Nope. They have delays. They screen the callers. They use all kinds of techniques to make sure only legit people get on the line.
Here’s something interesting about the dump box you might not know - it doesn’t actually mute anything. The reason it’s called a dump box is because it zeros the delay - literally clearing the buffer, and jumping back to live, effectively jumping forward in time, rather than muting. When it was first invented, it was done with tape, and the delay was created by the physical distance between the write head and the read head.
Here’s something else interesting - Art Bell, back in the Midnight in the desert and Coast to Coast heyday, didn’t screen calls at all. He had a dump button for swears, but no screening.
It’s true. I’m one of the mods for the Fast Karate/Jumping Through Bossdoors streams. A friend of mine, Rin, has a small mod team for his channel, too.
Weirdly I’m a mod on the extra creditz twitch channel.
Or at least I may still be. During the very very early days of their nonsense James had a stream for like 25 people (nobody knew who extra creditz was back then (in fact it was still called extra creditz)) and we talked about a few novels for a few hours. The low number of people let us actually have a conversation. Everyone there was made a mod.
That is the story of the last time I ever went to that stream.
I still watched their videos until their recent… stuff but shortly after that day I realized I didn’t get why everyone liked streaming. Having a conversation the way we did that day kept not happening again and again until I gave up.
Now I just stream basically SGDQ and that’s like… it.
I know that feeling, sort of - Fast Karate streams are very much like that whenever there’s a stream on, be it Dave and Graz, or if it’s just one of the community members. It’s not at the too-big-to-have-a-normal-conversation stage, so thankfully skipping that part, but those conversations are always good.
I weirdly know a lot about old timey radio production. I read a bunch of textbooks on it when I was trying to spin up GeekNights.
In the ancient days of the early 90s, the process wasn’t materially different from what it is today. It’s just cheaper and the tools are more accessible.