Posts Tagged “tivoli”

One time, at podcamp, somebody stood up and talked about how her business – an art gallery – had invited local art bloggers over one night for a gallery tour and general chat, and about how this had been a wildly successful PR and community-building exercise. If any gallerists are reading, I suggest you take note. And if any expensive restaurants or clothing stores would like to try this, please do get in touch with me right away.

Yesterday, I got just such an invitation from one of my favorite institutions, WBUR-FM, an NPR station that is more or less permanently tuned on my home and car radios. The good people of WBUR have had the foresight to invest in new media initiatives, including the excellent blog, The ConverStation, ably helmed by Ken George, to which I referred earlier.

Ken invited local bloggers and social media types through facebook, twitter, and maybe even personal invitations, and despite biblical weather, about 15-20 people showed up for a tour of the station, networking, chatting and eventually, eating and drinking. See the WBUR socials flickr group for some not very incriminating photos.

What the heck is that, you ask? It’s a beautiful wooden sound baffle, on the wall of the engineering room next to one of the air studios at BUR. Reminds me of old type-sorting cases. I totally want one. You can see it with more context in the background of some of the flickr pics. Each box is few inches across and has a different depth, turning it into an acoustic black hole, especially at the lower frequencies. Bass checks in, but it doesn’t check out.

Unfortunately, this might be a metaphor for the future of public radio in a digital, on-demand world. Here are some thoughts from the free-wheeling discussion after the tour. I’m sure a lot more was batted around at the bar after, but I had to cut out early for dinner.

Everybody agreed that we all love NPR programming, and eveybody agreed that we all hate pledge time. Some even hate underwriting announcements, and they’re about as painless as ads can be. I learned that NPR underwriting messages cannot include any call to action or any mention of competition or offers. Sadly, this helps confirm why as a marketer, I consider underwriting to be a donation that makes the executives feel good, not a marketing program that drives business.

So what does a roomful of smart social media types say about this? Some suggested that they’d be happy to pay for an ad-free (no underwriting, no pledge driving) audio stream or podcast on a subscription basis. I’ll leave the logistics of pay per podcast – and what to put in the stream gaps left by excluding the pledge drives – to the techies. This hints at the basic problem the old commercial (or pledge) system has: you can’t fast-forward TV or radio, but you sure can fast-forward a podcast. Actually, with TiVo and the like, you can fast-forward TV, and I think there’s something similar for radio.

The next idea that circulated was wondering if people would pay for individual programs by subscription, or individual episodes on demand. This led to discussion of whether public radio looks at how much pledge money comes in from different shows (they do) and whether the pledge-per-show model might let some shows float themselves and others that can’t pay their bills just dry up and die.

I opined that the very premise of public radio was that some kinds of programming could not support themselves in the market, but had such redeeming qualities that it was in the national interest to subsidize them. The elitist and paternalistic nature of public radio is at odds with the both tough-love capitalism and the populism (Diggocracy?) of the internets. Ouch. I guess we really are all batch of quiche-eating prius drivers.

I bet that lots of public radio shows could be commercially viable: Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and even This American Life come to mind. (Not all examples are WBUR shows, and NPR syndication is a bit piece of the puzzle here that I’m going to skip for brevity) But what about the stuff that they are essentially subsidizing, Con Salsa, RadioLab, and most of the news? On the one hand, the low, low price of internet distribution could put some of those shows back in the black if they could avoid sharing the big fixed costs of terrestrial radio production and distribution. But on the other hand, dropping those shows from the air would likely make them even even less able to raise money, especially if the station cut them off from a share of the pledge pie.

I’m usually all about free marketeering, but for the small slice of my taxes that goes to support cultural stuff, I’m pretty happy to subsidize and then to pay again on top of that. I hope Ken and the WBUR crew can find their way in this brave new world.

Speaking of free and not so free markets, if you have any disposable income left after tithing to public radio, you might look into the latest in expensive wooden radios, the Tivoli Audio NetWorks internet radio, available in cherry, walnut and wenge, pictured below. (Wikipedia says its endangered, Tivoli says sustainably harvested, go figure)

You may recall that I have a thing for wooden radios, and I periodically check in on what’s new in tree-based audio products. I’ve been critical of Tivoli for getting things painfully almost right in the past, and I think this is another one of those. But the release to market of a $600 internet-only (FM radio costs you an additional $50) audio device has got to mean something to the discussion above. Tivoli is pitching hard on the angle that you don’t need a computer to use this thing to listen to hundreds of radio stations from all around the world, you just need an internet connection. If there’s a place where lots of people have high-speed internet but no computer, I must have missed it. Maybe they just mean you could put this radio in a room where you don’t have a computer, like your bathroom. If you need a $600 internet radio in your bathroom, you need more fiber in your diet.

I haven’t seen or heard or touched this device, but I’m going to tell you what I think anyway since I’ve seen and heard and touched many other Tivoli products.

It’s gorgeous – from the waist down. The geometry of the box and the speaker and their colors and materials look great. I love the wenge especially. I recognize that it probably needs a digital display, but couldn’t they come up with something less ugly? I would think that a color screen wouldn’t be hard to pull off at this price point. And maybe you don’t need those two rivets on the display frame? Ick. The credit-card remote looks like it has those awful blister buttons, too. There’s a button or knob on the top of the unit that might – just might – approach the joy of the geared-down knob on the Model One, but sadly, I doubt it.

It’s expensive - I’ve mentioned this a few times and I’m still a bit in shock. For $600 you get a mono internet radio. Other internet radios cost half that. If you already have a computer, you can get speakers for even less. And you have to add $50 more for FM and another $100 for a second speaker for stereo sound. I can’t tell if the second speaker is connected by cable or wireless. Conspicuously absent, an ipod dock. Clearly, this is a premium product, so I say, just take the whole kaboodle up to $800 or $1000 and don’t nickel and dime your premium customers.

It probably sounds great - I really don’t know, but the reviewers seem to like it, and it has some spiffy buffering technology that might reduce the chop of a lousy internet stream. The wooden case bodes well, too.

It’ll be interesting to see how this product goes for Tivoli. If they’re right, there are some people willing to pony up big bucks to get good looks and good sound with internet radio. If they’re wrong, the XM-Sirius monster might eat their lunch, or the internet radio generation will just pass them by. That would be a shame, I think the world needs more and better wooden cases for its electronics.

In computers and related devices, for a long time, things were pretty much grey, black and silver in some kind of rotation until the ipod and imac made white the new black. Periodically, a hot cell phone or other device makes a signature color briefly hip.  Then Apple made a bunch of colors the new white, then it was silver and a bunch of more muted colors,  and black and white, and now they seem to be settling into an aluminum phase.  Interestingly, part of that story is that aluminum is a “greener” material than the plastic that was black or white.  Not really renewable, but recyclable and not as polluting to produce.

Although I’m not particularly hip to Microsoft’s anti-ipod, the Zune, I was pleased to see some interesting colors there.  Too bad they didn’t keep brown when they revised the device recently.   I gues UPS owns that patch.

I’m happy to see that a few electronic items are still or newly available in enclosures made of real wood – so far pretty much only speakers and radios – and I hope more are in the pipeline.  There’s nothing quite like the feel of wood, and I like the fact that each piece has a unique grain pattern.   Sure, some woods are endangered and some stains are terribly toxic, but some woods are sustainably harvested and are very renewable.

I’m not sure I’m ready for a wood ipod or pc, but I could see some limited use in mobile phones, maybe as an accent, like in some luxury cars, but less cheesy.  But wood has a real advantage in acoustics – wooden speakers sound great.

I couldn’t be happier with my Tivoli Model One radio.  In addition to the beautiful solid wood case and room-filling single speaker, the giant geared down tuning knob is a joy to turn.   If Tivoli had not so completely missed the mark with their Model Three clock radio (ridiculous price, terrible alarm clock) and iYiYi ipod thingy (overcomplicated controls, weird design, not wood. overpriced again), they would almost certainly have collected my money for a clock radio and ipod speaker system, too.  I like that they are adding more woods and finishes, but I don’t care for the direction the usability and technology are going.  I might have to buy another Model One to store away for when mine dies and Tivoli has totally jumped the shark.

As it is, I’m making do with a lousy alarm clock, and recently bought the Vers 2x ipod speaker.  The Vers is not as complete a design as the Tivoli, but that’s a high bar.  The wood is actually veneer, but it seems to be a high-quality one – I couldn’t tell until I read about it – and it sounds great has a good clean design.

Seemingly available only for Zune (not for ipod) is the iHome ZN14D, looking like a smaller Vers with plastic versions of the Model One’s controls grafted onto the front.  I’d have to have a closer look, but I’m guessing that it’s not at the quality level of either Vers or Tivoli.

But I’m glad it’s there, in its wooden case with retro rounded corners. I look forward to more ecological and aesthetic use of wood in electronics and elsewhere.