Northern Exposure Radio

((I wrote the following piece before Apple rolled podcasting into iTunes and blew the whole thing wide open. Still, most of this still holds.))

People love Tivo. Especially people with kids. TiVo lets you watch things over and over (a known kid thing), it lets you be interrupted in the middle and come back (a parent thing), and it entirely frees you from that strange parade known as the “broadcast schedule”. We all love a parade now and then, but not every day.

I don’t watch much TV, and I don’t have TiVo, but I listen to a lot of music and radio. So where’s radio TiVo? For one thing, audio files are so much smaller than video files, so it should be easier, not harder, to have TiVo for radio. Technically speaking, I could have been caching, skipping, choosing, pausing, and rewinding radio for years.

But there's at least one important problem: too many radios. Radio emanates from a cornucopia of fairly inexpensive devices. By comparison, TV is consumed from a big, expensive stationary box that people are willing to invest in. They’ll add expensive, bulky hardware to their expensive, bulky TV if they think it will improve their experience. On the other hand, adding expensive capabilities to a light, nimble, portable item like a radio -- and getting people to pay for it -- is a real trick.

It’s a trick so difficult, apparently, that Apple had to leave out the radio tuner to do it. There is no tuner in iPods. And that’s sort of a shame. I would love to use my iPod clickwheel to scrub back and forth through Morning Edition. I would listen to everything Nina Totenberg said, twice.

Steve Jobs probably declared to himself, one fine day in the early development of the iPod, that radio just wasn’t worth worrying about, and the die was cast. And I suppose he wasn't far wrong. That decision certainly never hurt the iPod. Radio definitely isn’t an exciting medium right now, so people aren’t passionate about access to it.

And radio has poor metadata, which makes storing, indexing, and accessing content much harder to do. TV shows are long things, with good metadata. Radio comes in small, often unlabeled pieces. Weather, traffic, news, songs, call-ins, ads, interviews, features -- all these could occur, some more than once, in the length of one TV show. So on the one hand, it’s hard to create a TiVo-style menu of choices for the radio consumer. And on the other, it's doubtful that users want to make that many choices, moment to moment, about what they want to hear. Decisions points that come once every half and hour, or once an hour -- that's about right. And that's what TiVo supplies.

There are long-form shows on the radio, but a lot of them have already shown up on the web, ready for podcasting into my iPod. And I have plenty of music on my iPod -- more than I can handle, actually. So what’s left that’s unique on the radio? Why tune in?

Well, to name a few possibilities, there are lots of "live" data we might like: sporting events; updates and breaking news; realtime information and offers (come to this new Target tonight, for special deals!); information that quickly goes stale (traffic reports, etc). There are events which involve (or could involve) the listener directly in the content, such as call-in shows; broadcasts from parties and premiers; etc. For those kind of shows, just the feeling that it's live -- that it's happening right now, and I *could* be part of it, even if I'm not -- is part of the value. Cached radio can't duplicate that.

And finally, there is local radio, emanating right now from someone in my community, who is simply reflecting the reality, right now, of the place in which I live. And listening to that sort of content as a recording simply makes no sense. We instinctively respond to and recognize this concept: e.g. the radio stations in "Northern Exposure," "Do the Right Thing," "Pump Up the Volume" or "Gross Pointe Blank." People love that idea, they want that experience, and it's something that neither commercial radio, nor my iPod, can supply.

But I do think it will come. Everything I just mentioned will, I think, emerge more strongly as radio evolves into a live medium, with an identity distinct from recorded media of all kinds.