[BC] Where the industry is headed?

[Tom Taggart]

That Wheatstone survey looks suspiciously like a marketing
tool for their digital consoles ;-)!

The last couple of NAB radio shows there has been a plethora
of seminars on digital this, digital that, how to get social
disease from social media,no, wait, I think topic was
slightly different...

We took our 25 year old ops mgr to the last show in
Philly--it didn't take long before he became disgusted with
all the hype.  While he certainly qualifies as a
"millennial," he's also a broadcast veteran, starting with
us when he was 16, and working for a year or so as a weekend
news producer at one of our local network V's.

Like most independent stations we don't have an unlimited
corporate budget to play games with.  24 hour streaming
would be nice, but not under the present rate/regulatory
structure. No practical way to monetize it to cover the
costs.

We dabble in social media, we have websites, but with three
music stations we just don't generate enough local content
to justify podcasts, or news pages. Now if we had a
news-talk it might be different. 

In D.C., BIA-Kelsey covered the growth of different revenue
sources for broadcast.  While their projections showed
growth in internet/social media the total % of revenue
attributed to these sources was very tiny. 

The bottom line: If you are in the radio business--be in the
radio business. Best to stick to one's own knitting.