Guess your nephews and nieces are giving new meaning to the phrase "baby
changing station." They're showing good sense, and radio will have to adjust to
the choices that technology offers them.

I'd argue though that as MTV shortens the attention span of young people, it
creates acceptance of audiovisual clutter rather than resistance to it. And
inevitably a bit of impatience with audio alone.

Jerome


"Rich Wood" wrote in message
...
On 22 Dec 2003 17:53:52 GMT, "M. Hale"
wrote:

Isn't the point to increase "Time Spent Listening" to be full 15 minute
blocks so the station gets credit for that? If you run two 10 minute
breaks, you can have 20 minutes of programming between them gaining 40
minutes Time Spent Listening over the course of the hour assuming one
comes back after the commercials.

Part of it is to get 2 quarter hours before listeners tune away. In
the case of the limited number of breaks, "research has shown" that
listeners are more aware of the number of elements than they are of
their length. A :60 is perceived the same as a :30. Each is an
element.

The hope is that listeners will perceive fewer elements in a limited
number of breaks than they would with more breaks with fewer spots.

When the breaks were 5 minutes it was tolerable. Now that the spots
seem to outnumber the songs, listeners are wearing out their radio's
presets. Especially young listeners. I have a couple of my young
nieces and nephews visiting. Not only do they change stations when a
single song they don't like plays, they immediately change stations
when a break begins. I thank MTV for creating generations with 3
second attention spans.

I asked why. They said "it'll be a long time before the music starts
again."

That's not something a programmer wants to hear.

Both radio and TV are so riddled with clutter that it amazes me anyone
stays tuned. Listen to your favorite station for an hour. Write down
every time a new element begins. Music, news, spots, promos, jingles
and jock chatter each constitutes an element.

TV has taken clutter to awesome heights, both aural and visual.
Vitually every channel has a "bug" supered over all but commercials.
Annoying as hell. During shows there's a crawl or a super about an
upcoming show. Crawls used to be used only for emergency information.
I can only imagine the anger of a movie director when he sees his
masterpiece splattered with material that destroys the mood he tried
to create. Often one super overlaps another.

Rich

In article , Charles Hobbs wrote:
There is (was) one channel out there (Bloomberg News?) that looked
more like a web page than a TV channel, with all the crawls, windows,
etc. on the screen ....

There is a reason for that. They're not trying to SELL you stuff,
they're trying to give you stock ticker, news capsules, time and
weather so that they can devote the "talking head" portion of the
screen to news and interviews that would otherwise would be
impossible to do if you had to break for all of the stuff that's
running on the crawls and tabs.

It's an efficient screen space use for an all-news channel. However,
it is annoying when the soap-opera, comedy or movie you're watching
gets blasted by this flash and then a crawl for an ad or promo starts
appearing at the bottom or top of the screen.

It was fine when they started doing ad crawls for the World Cup soccer
games so you didn't have to interrupt the fast moving games years ago,
but now it's gotten out of hand.

Maybe I wouldn't mind as much if the TV stations and cable channels
would just run ad crawls at the bottom and ditched the "spot" method
of advertising.

--
Sven Weil
New York City, U.S.A.

Hmmmm.....Radio TIVO....."local processing"....(c;

Once you teach the computer where the spots are in time, it could be
automated.....


Larry W4CSC

NNNN

On 24 Dec 2003 07:54:42 GMT, Tom Desmond wrote:

Broadcasters and cable networks are truly killing the value of their
media with all this clutter.

I get irate when the computer crawlers are superimposed over the
ACTION. All during the war all this computer crap blocked us from
seeing the pictures they spent millions to bring us. How stupid.

I'm told the reason for the source label in the corner of all the
programming is required by the copyright holders' contracts. It's so
the lawyers can tell where the copyrighted program material was
recorded from. Laughingly, they live with a grand vision the crap on
the screen has some kind of post-transmission value...(c;


Larry W4CSC

NNNN

On 23 Dec 2003 22:43:28 GMT, "Cooperstown.Net"
wrote:

I'd argue though that as MTV shortens the attention span of young people, it
creates acceptance of audiovisual clutter rather than resistance to it. And
inevitably a bit of impatience with audio alone.

I think we may be saying the same thing. I believe MTV's (and now
everyone else's) technique of fast-paced editing has reduced their
tolerance for long (in time) shots over a few seconds. I don't believe
they have greater tolerance for clutter.

By and large, radio advertising is boring stuff. it's usually some
screaming jock or business owner hawking something that has no
relevance to the audience. Agencies are so devoted to TV that radio is
a second thought. I can't remember the last radio spot I heard. I can
remember spots made years ago by people like Stan Freberg who believed
in theatre of the mind.

Rich

"Sven Franklyn Weil" wrote in message
...

It's funny. Some people get teed off because the station
"overannounces" the call sign or name. Yet...some of these people
also get annoyed when you DON'T hear a call sign or name until the top
of the hour.

Radio is a mass medium, and you can't keep everyone happy. So the station
must make decisions based on what they perceive the audience wants, and what
is good for the station. Another classic example can be local severe
weather. Two people can be listening to the same broadcast, and one thinks
you're not doing enought to cover the weather situation, while the other
thinks you're over-reacting and trying to scare people and would you please
shut up about the damn weather! Of course when we get them hurricanes here,
nobody thinks you're broadcasting too much weather! HI!

Paul Jensen
Florida's Emerald Coast

That's the part that confuses me. We've got music stations that
announce "coming up next --

That's when I tune out. Once they say "coming up" that tells you that
what's really coming up is a truckload of commercials and mindless promos.
Listeners know that. Stations that do this are telegraphing their stopsets.

Paul Jensen
Florida's Emerald Coast

"Steven J Sobol" wrote in message
...

Wink 106 FM in Corning, New York, used to play that game a few years
ago...
I'd hear it when I was driving through Corning on the way to Albany or
Boston.
The jingles said "Wink 106, W-I-N-K". WINK-FM, if I'm not mistaken, is in
Tampa, or was a few years ago anyhow. Even at the top of the hour, the DJ
would ID the station correctly ("You're listening to WNKI,
Corning/Elmira")
and right after that you would hear the rest of the jingle, which used the
wrong calls (WINK).

I never cared enough to file a complaint with the FCC, but it's still not
right. I'd be ****ed if I owned or worked for the stations whose calls
were
being improperly used.

I've been out of the business for awhile, but isn't there a rule prohibiting
a station from misleading or pretending to be another station? This
wouldn't apply to the WSC case that started this thread, but the 102.7 KIIS
scenerio would.

Paul Jensen
Florida's Emerald Coast

On 24 Dec 2003 15:18:30 GMT, (Larry W4CSC) wrote:

I'm told the reason for the source label in the corner of all the
programming is required by the copyright holders' contracts.

No. It's simply so you have the channel or logo in front of you all
the time. Copyright holders have no authority over the network or the
stations in this case.

This is one of the reasons my DVD collection is so large.

Rich

On 25 Dec 2003 16:42:55 GMT, Rich Wood wrote:

On 24 Dec 2003 15:18:30 GMT, (Larry W4CSC) wrote:

I'm told the reason for the source label in the corner of all the
programming is required by the copyright holders' contracts.

No. It's simply so you have the channel or logo in front of you all
the time. Copyright holders have no authority over the network or the
stations in this case.

This is one of the reasons my DVD collection is so large.

Rich

alt.binaries.movies.divx

This is the reason MY movie collection is SO large....(c;


Larry W4CSC

NNNN