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Customize Your Morning Commute News
from the custom-drive-time dept
The San Francisco Chronicle has just announced an interesting new offering. They're going to let people download and burn to CD custom news each morning that they can listen to on their commute to work. At first I wasn't sure this was such a good idea, but the more I thought about it, the better it sounded. Being able to customize exactly what sorts of news you want to listen to (and for how long) helps get past the lack of choice on the radio each morning. The big question, though, is how many people will want to go through the hurdle each morning of downloading and burning the CD.
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audible
Audible lets you do this automatically with subscriptions to WSJ and/or NYTimes -- provided you have a blank CD-R in the drive over night, you'll have news ready-to-go without any interaction in the morning.
Note: Audible just doubled their subscription prices for many long-time customers, and judging by the fact that the most often-viewed item in their help site is now "how do I cancel my Audible account", I am likely NOT the only one who cancelled his account in response.
Hey, this might even be a covert submission to Techdirt.....
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Customized News
The CD idea seems like a half step away from creating your own custom streaming news (or any format) channel. I realize the technology/market is not here yet, but imagine being able to have a personalized web page where you can store your preferences for audio and have the site find and compile an audio program for you. You could stream it to your browser at the office, download it to any storage medium like CD, MP3, Pocket PC or MiniDisc player. The only difference between what I propose and a system like Audible is an ability to send this custom channel out over the air via XM or Sirius, which might actually justify their subscription costs. My custom channel would sound something like this: 1:00 minutes of Local news (local ads), 15:00 minutes of Local Talk radio call-in show (local ads) 1:00 minute of Traffic and Weather (local ads) 16:00 minutes (one segment) of Howard Stern (national ads), 1:00 minute of Traffic and Weather (local ads) 16:00 minutes (one segment) of Jim Rome (national ads) 1:00 minute Local News headlines (local ads) 16:00 minutes Bill O'Reilly (national ads) etc... Microsoft's Media Player is ready to do everything now, except of course the over the air trasmission.
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