Archive for November 11th, 2005

(corrections made)

I will not support your failed business model.

On the days when I drive to work (more often than not now that the sun sets at about 4:30pm, it seems), I like listening to Howard Stern. The humor is often juvenile and mindless, but I find it a somehow relaxing way to start the day. What I find to be far more interesting is the ongoing battle between Howard and Infinity Broadcasting, the FCC and the religious right. Stern is the top money maker for Infinity Broadcasting, yet the company has removed him from markets. Funny, whenever Stern is removed from a market, that station drops from #1 to far behind the competition.

Stern is also leaving terrestrial radio in a highly publicized move to Sirius Satellite.

So, terrestrial radio is pretty broken. The efforts of the FCC and the religious right are at direct odds with the desires of their target marketplace. But there is something even more broken about radio.

Radio stations (conglomerates, really) generate most of their revenue from advertising. That is, they have to break up the programming with advertising just like television. On television, a 1 hour show will actually have 43 minutes of content and 17 minutes of advertising — usually in 3 or 4 commercial blocks.

While driving into work, the local Infinity Broadcasting station played 19 — yes 19 — advertisements back to back. Of those, 4 were repeats. It was something like 15 minutes of solid advertising. Clearly, this drives away customers. It certainly drives me away as I typically hit a different station as soon as the commercial starts (I decided to actually count this time).

That is insane! I don’t understand the logic. Clearly, they are trying to boost revenues by selling more ads. If so, then why is the delivery in a form that is so incredibly easy to avoid simply by hitting a button? You’d think they would break up the content a bit more and interleave it with the advertising or something.

And to think that these idiots wonder why they are losing market share to satellite, internet media, and other delivery mechanisms….

There have been a lot of questions about when and where one can deploy WebObjects applications to non-Apple platforms. The new license agreement attempts to address these questions (from paragraph 2D):

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may also deploy server applications built with the WebObjects Software on any platform.

I hope that clears things up.

Apparently not. Ok. To rephrase: Take the key included with the dev tools and deploy wherever the hell you want to (within the terms of the license). Just don’t come crying to Apple when you deploy on an AmEx blue card and you find some mysterious transactions in the Caymans on your next statement.