March 29, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: FM Radio on Cellphones, Long Sought by Broadcasters, Comes to Sprint

For years, the radio industry has watched with worry as consumers snap up all kinds of electronic gadgets — from cellphones to tablets to set-top TV boxes — that deliver seemingly every kind of media but that old standby, terrestrial radio.

Digital Notes

Daily updates on the business of digital music.

This week, broadcasters won a victory of sorts through a deal with Sprint Nextel, which will make local FM radio signals available on some of its smartphones. It is the first such deal with a phone carrier after years of pressure from the major radio broadcasters. Yet whether customers, and other phone companies, will take to the idea is far from certain.

“My mission is to get radio in 300 million cellphones,” said Jeffrey Smulyan, chief executive of Emmis Communications, who represented a wide group of radio companies in negotiations. “This is a very important start.”

Under the three-year deal, announced on Tuesday, Sprint will make FM radio available on some of its Android and Windows phones, using a tuner application called NextRadio. The app — designed by Emmis, which owns 21 stations around the country — will allow some interactivity with other forms of media on the phone. Mr. Smulyan said he believed that radio listening could increase 15 percent if it were widely available on cellphones.

Both Sprint and the major radio companies will invest in the effort, and they can also share revenue from certain kinds of advertising that make use of the radio and phone features: for example, if a radio ad for a fast-food restaurant is accompanied by a coupon accessible on the phone.

Many cellphones are built with the capacity to receive radio signals, but that feature is typically left dormant by manufacturers and carriers. Sprint’s service will let users receive FM signals through the tuner app.

Phone companies have resisted such deals in the past. But Kevin McGinnis, Sprint’s vice president of product platforms, said that reduced costs and greater earning potential had persuaded the company to take the step. “There was a little bit of convincing that this was not just a need for functionality, that there was a value proposition here,” Mr. McGinnis said.

Sprint, with nearly 56 million customers, is the third largest mobile carrier in the United States, after Verizon and ATT.

Getting a place on cellphones may be a priority for radio broadcasters, but it is unclear how much consumers will be interested. Radio stations are already widely available on phones through streaming apps like TuneIn and Clear Channel Communications’s iHeartRadio, which offer not only local stations but also thousands from around the world.

One benefit to consumers is that a terrestrial radio signal would most likely fall outside of cell carriers’ metered data plans, which charge for data use above a certain threshold.

Yet in a sign of just how much competition the NextRadio feature will face, Sprint announced separately on Tuesday a bundle of streaming apps for Android phones, including music services like iHeartRadio, Spotify, Slacker and Shazam, as well as apps for watching television and movies.


Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/fm-radio-on-cellphones-long-sought-by-broadcasters-comes-to-sprint/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Carol Bartz’s Blunt E-Mail on Firing Raises Issues

With those four words, Yahoo’s chief executive, Carol A. Bartz, did something Tuesday afternoon that dismissed managers almost never do: She told the truth.

In the upper echelons of corporate America, executives are forever leaving to pursue urgent opportunities, develop important new ventures or, that old standby, spend more time with their long-neglected families. Hardly anyone ever admits to being sacked. Even in cases where the executive has all but been bodily ejected from his executive suite — Rick Wagoner of prebankruptcy General Motors or Tony Hayward of post-oil-spill BP — the most they say is that they have been asked to step aside.

Ms. Bartz’s blunt statement, sent in an e-mail blast to Yahoo’s 13,400 employees, immediately ignited a debate: Was she a pioneer trying to provide more transparency and authenticity at the top ranks of prominent companies, or was her salvo an unprofessional tirade that was a personal and professional mistake?

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor who is an expert in organizational behavior, is in the first group. “The truth helps you improve,” he said. “When people lose their jobs and there’s no acknowledgement, the potential for learning is lost.” Ms. Bartz’s comments also served her own cause, the professor said. “She’s acting as if this is not her fault. She’s not embarrassed. She’s controlling the story.”

But Jennifer Chatman, a professor and chair of the Haas Management of Organizations Group at the University of California, Berkeley, said Ms. Bartz’s angry words could help sink the struggling search portal. Now the directors who ejected Ms. Bartz are under attack at the moment employees need them to save Yahoo.

“A chief executive who was thinking first about the long-term interests of her company would not have done this,” Ms. Chatman said, adding that there are problems of perception in this case as well: “She’s one of a handful of top female business leaders. It would be easy to attach this to a stereotype of women leaders as not in control of their emotions.”

Whatever the effect on Yahoo, unvarnished comments like Ms. Bartz’s are likely to become more common. Chief executives are increasingly conscious of their personal brand and how it can diverge from the corporate brand.

“I would say this is going to become much more of a trend,” said Homa Bahrami, a senior lecturer at Berkeley and an adviser to several Silicon Valley start-ups. “I see it already in private companies when there is a change in management. The chief executive picks up the phone and tells the investors exactly what happened. The younger generation appreciates this honesty. You’re authentic and you’re vulnerable.”

Authenticity, though, can backfire, and vulnerability is not always something to be desired. Executives who are not on their way out are learning that broadcasting their feelings can have unintended consequences.

Andrew Mason, chief executive of Groupon, may have thought he was only trying to buck up the troops when he sent a long e-mail describing how the daily deals site was being misperceived in the press as it awaited its public offering. Mr. Mason may have even been secretly pleased when the e-mail showed up in the press. Regulators cast a dim eye on such promotion during the so-called quiet period for companies waiting to go public, however, and Groupon’s offering is now at risk of being delayed or even pulled.

In the technology industry as in no other, failure is trumpeted as paving the way to glory. Executives here love to boast about the number of times their company was denied funding or how no one wanted to hire them or how they learned so much when the whole ship went down. But such tales are always told from the vantage point of ultimate success. In the midst of failure, people are as reluctant to admit it in Silicon Valley as anywhere.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/technology/carol-bartzs-blunt-e-mail-on-firing-raises-issues.html?partner=rss&emc=rss