The Infinite Dial

Earlier this week I heard one of New York's most prominent morning shows promote the fact that they had a live interview with Patrick Dempsey coming up 'in a couple of hours' at 9:30 that morning.

Honestly, I didn't really care to hear that interview. But I've had Podcasting on my mind lately, especially since we debuted our most recent report on Podcasting (available here). So I went to that station's Web site later that day out of curiosity to see if I could download that interview as a Podcast.

Of course, the answer is no.

So I kept digging on the Web sites of major New York radio stations. At best, what is available today is a mixed bag. Power 105 seems to regularly update its site with a feature or two from that morning's Ed Lover show. Hot 97 periodically posts from Miss Jones's show, and allows you to subscribe to her Juicy Juice feature - but oddly one cannot listen to it on demand from the site. Z100 does an admirable job of posting 'What we talked about today' on their site, but frustratingly doesn't seem to let you listen to 'What they talked about." They do post the listing of birthdays that they announce on the air as a daily podcast. They also, to their credit, post their highly-discussed 'Phone Taps' for download, although it is not clear from the site which day they are from.

The rest of the stations, and I checked the site of every major commercial station, either has a mish-mash of old material or, more likely, nothing.

Of course, down at the non-commercial end of the dial, every single story from today's "Morning Edition" from NPR is immediately available, as it is every day. If you want to hear today's Chris Moyles show on BBC's Radio 1, it's there immediately as a stream, including a Web page showing the 'running order' so you can easily find the place on the stream you are looking for.

And then, this morning I was listening to a Philadelphia morning show, and they were promoting their own interview with a high-profile guest coming up Friday at 9:30am. "Don't worry," they assured their audience, "we will repeat it Monday in the 7 o'clock hour so you can listen if you aren't available at 9:30." And while I admire this approach, and would recommend it myself, the fact that they didn't add "and it will be available as a podcast on our site" just serves to make radio seem so 1994.

I say this without hesitation - we simply have to start putting all our non-musical material up on our sites immediately, and the entire morning show should be available as a stream immediately after the broadcast. We are in an on-demand world, and with TiVo and YouTube our consumers are trained to be able to find content when and where they want it. Bear in mind these Podcasts can be a revenue-generator if you put a pre-roll spot in front of them. But we have to start picking up those people who missed listening to things the first time around, or want to hear it again, or are just fans of our shows.