Private to public

sing love,
originally uploaded by rcameraw.

WQXR, the oldest commercial classical radio station in the US, is going to move over to public radio this 8PM October 8th, moving 9.6 MHz up the FM dial and going from its .com domain to a new .org domain as well. I hope they are able to keep the line-up of announcers: Annie Bergen, Jeff Spurgeon, Elliott Forrest, Bill Jerome, Midge Woolsey, Clayelle Dalferes, and the delightfully named Candice Agree. I will have to listen to the commercial spots between now and then to see if there's anything I'll be missing too.

They'll be swapping frequencies with Univision's reggaeton station La Kalle. Should make for some fun confusion for those not clued in on the shift.

Opt-out campaign ads

If there's anything as annoying as public radio and television pledge campaigns, it's political campaign ads sprouting up on the airwaves every Fall. I know they work to sway the undecided voters, but for those of us who have their minds made up (for some time now, actually), they are a waste of time and money.

Couldn't a subscription model work there too? Once you've decided you don't need any more of the arguments they are proposing, really and truly for sure, you could flip a setting on your TV and radio and telephone and be spared any further pitches.

Maybe we could arrange things that the act of switching the setting actually registers your vote ahead of time absentee-style. That way the political interests would know for sure that there is no point bombarding you any further, since you have already made your choice, October/November surprises or no. So making your selection would have to be done only when you have a feeling of ironclad commitment, also telling the political powers that there is also no point in appeals to you attempting to affect the voter turnout (the second main function of political ads).

In order to get people to keep their minds open and to not opt-out, advertising consultants would have an incentive to make their ads interesting to watch and creative, the same way other advertisers have. The undecideds might want to withhold their commitment in order to enjoy the play of ideas and issues right up until Election Day. This, I think, would also be a good thing as something to help counteract voter apathy.

Block those pledge breaks

It's Fall pledge drive time for one of the two public radio broadcast stations here, a thing which always makes my level of goodwill toward the system plummet. I support the stations when I can (i.e., not at the moment), but it strikes me as unfair that those who do respond to the pleas and commit their money are not immediately spared the crapfest of begging for the remainder of the drive.

You get an initial bit of good-feeling when they thank you and maybe read your name on the air, but in the hours and days to come, what do you get for being upstanding? Only torture. You're at the mercy of the rest of the listening audience as to when the proceedings end, and who wants to trust those people?

Once the radio spectrum gets converted to digital, this can all end.

The idea is that at the time of a pledge, supporters would be given a limited-duration key to a station's secondary audio broadcast which would be blessedly free of fundraising activity. This incentive would be much, much better than a coffee mug or umbrella typically given out as a come-on! Special digital receivers would be built to accept a key that lucky listener would receive as part of the confirmation of their donation and this would unlock (unscramble, basically) the programming. The receiver would be portable, so that you could unlock it when you're at home, then stick it in your vehicle and bring it to work with you too. I would make the key pairs would automatically change after a brief time interval, say 5 minutes, to reduce any incentive to share these valuable pieces of information over the Internet or by other means. The subscription to the secondary broadcast would last for however long the fund drive lasts, and then become useless when the encryption would be turned off. Till next time.

Now I know this scheme is not bulletproof: the keys could be brute-forced, people could conspire to trade keys, the automatic key-changing algorithm could be attacked. But hey! these are public radio listeners we're talking about here, not people trying to hack access to a central bank, after all. More sinister would be the temptation for these broadcasters to go to into full-time fundraising mode, which would effectively turn their service to a sort of subscription radio for classical music and news junkies, sort of like the way the satellite radio companies run things.