Okay, now that my brother’s wedding is over, and my family members have redistributed themselves around the country, I can get back to the task at hand. I’ve get twenty-six more business ideas to write about over the next three weeks.

To get back in the groove of things I’ll start off with an easy one.

I’m an avid listener of public radio. In my opinion, it’s the absolute best source of news in today’s media marketplace. Every morning, on my way to the office, I listen to the Diane Rehm Show. And most evenings, I try to catch Marketplace on my way home.

There’s an excellent local show (produced by Salt Lake City’s KUER) called Radio West. I rarely listen to the live broadcast, since it airs at 11 AM, and I’m usually in a meeting or reading my morning email. And I almost never hear the first hour of Talk of the Nation, since it airs at noon, when I’m often out having a bite to eat with a few coworkers. I can’t remember the last time I listened to This American Life (one of my absolute favorites) since it plays on Sunday afternoons, when I’m rarely near a radio or sitting at a computer.

I like to imagine that there are a lot of other people like me. People who love public radio for its excellent journalism, for its uncanny attention to detail, and for its quirky humanity. People who listen to NPR in the car to and from work, and occasionally on their computers at the office. People who, due to their busy schedules, ultimately end up missing many of the radio shows they’d otherwise like to hear.

For people like that, I envision a new product: TiVo for audio streams.

The product I’m imagining works pretty much just like ordinary TiVo. You can listen to live broadcasts, but you can pause, resume, or rewind while listening live. As you use the software, it would start to learn your preferences. It would start to anticipate your listening habits, and it would discover new shows that you might also like. It would notice the kinds of topics that most interest you (politics, business, etc) or the names of people you find interesting (Mark Cuban, Noam Chomsky, etc), and it would record programs with those subjects, even if the programs aren’t the ones you normally like.

Unlike cable TV, where each show is generally only available on a single channel, there are dozens of audio streams from public radio stations all over the country. In many cases, if a particular stream becomes unavailable, the same program could be found on a different stream, from an entirely different broadcaster. In addition, by knowing the program schedule of all available NPR audio streams, the software could provide a more comprehensive selection of public broadcasting content than would be available from any individual station.

Some absolutely vital features of the software:

• For starters, the software would need to be able to decode streams in MP3, Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real Audio formats.
• The software would need the ability to pause and resume playback of live streams (a feature already included in all streaming-media applications). In addition, the ability to rewind within the stream would be very nice.
• Live streams should be transcoded to MP3 for storage on disk, and each show should be made available as a standalone MP3 file, handy for transferring to an iPod or burning to a CD.
• The software should be able to simultaneously record from two different audio streams, optionally allowing the user to listen to one of those streams.
• The software should connect to a central server to request a program schedule. The schedule server should know the dates and times of all the programs on a wide variety of streams, so that certain servers could be used for failover if the primary source experienced a technical problem.
• The software should manage its own storage queue. For example, if I allocate 500 MB of storage, then it should record about 500 minutes of programming, discarding (in chronological order) programs that have already been played to reclaim disk space for new programs.
• It should be easy to set up recording schedules. For example, a few of my favorite shows are the Friday editions of the Diane Rehm Show (the Friday “news roundup”) and Talk of the Nation (Science Friday). Also, I really enjoy Marketplace, but I’m not so crazy about The World. The software should always record the shows I love and only record the other shows if there’s enough available disk space, or if one of those shows has a guest (or topic) that really interests me.

Of course, there are other interesting audio streams besides just NPR. My local alternative radio station plays indie music every Sunday night, and since I really like to find new, unknown music, I’d be really interested in hearing it, but I can’t remember the last time I actually listened to that show. I don’t even remember what time they broadcast it. I’d also be interested in hearing some of the indie music shows from radio stations in San Francisco or Boulder, Colorado. (It may shock you, but indie music doesn’t exactly flourish in Salt Lake City.)

Anyhow, I think there’s a market for software like this. It’s a small market, but (among NPR listeners), it’s a relatively affluent and tech-savvy market. What’s more, advertising on NPR is relatively inexpensive (or, at least, I assume it is), and my intuition tells me that those ads would be more effective than an average radio ad. It’s also likely that some NPR member stations would be willing to link to my product website. Those kinds of targeted links would be worth their weight in hyperlink gold.

Pros:

• From an engineering standpoint, the software would be fairly simple, basically just consisting of an audio player, a transcoder, a web-service client, and a timer. I could certainly develop software like this within a six-month development schedule (assuming I can find libraries for the relevant codecs).
• I’m pretty sure there’s a market for software like this. I’d buy it. And other snobby, public-radio listeners like myself would probably buy it, too.
• Publishing a daily web-service with program schedules would provide a handy mechanism to enforce licensing terms and to prevent cracked versions of the software from proliferating. The software could be functional without the daily schedule feed, but the schedule feed would make it much more convenient, so users would have an incentive to pay for the software rather than to “evaluate” it indefinitely.

Cons:

• Many NPR radio shows already publish a podcast shortly after the program airs, and subscribing to a podcast feed is simpler than recording an audio stream. If all NPR shows become available as podcasts, the market for this kind of software would evaporate.
• Consumer-oriented software like this would have to be pretty cheap. If it was more than $20 or $30, sales would probably be pretty weak. Assuming a price-tag of $20, I would need to make more than 240 new sales per week in order to reach an annual revenue of $250,000. That’s a bigger number than I’m comfortable with, especially for a niche product like this. As such, it would be nice to monetize the daily schedule feed, but I’m not sure if that would be possible. I’ll have to give it some more thought.
• There are already waaaaay too many audio players on the market: Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Yahoo! Music Engine, Quicktime, and RealPlayer, to name just a few. For the most part, these players are free. How many people would be willing to install yet another media player (especially if they have to pay for it), even if that player offers advanced recording capabilities?

…

This is the fifth of 30 business ideas that I’ll be writing about over the course of 30 days. Some of the ideas are complex software suites geared toward large enterprise users. Some of them are simple goofball utilities for average-Joe computer users. One of them will become a product over the next six months, and the foundation of my new software business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 12:19 am and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.