Philippe Generali, President of RCS and Media Monitors
(from May's RBR/TVBR Solutions Magazine)
RBR recently reported CBS Radio was considering discontinuing business over the fact its competitor Clear Channel is buying you. The concern was CCU would have access to proprietary data from Selector and other systems. You assured us this could not happen.
Please explain in detail for other broadcasters with concerns.
Our business is by nature confidential. When you deal every week with almost 100% of the music stations in New York or Los Angeles, you'd better know how to keep your mouth shut! After 27 years and more than a half million telephone calls handled for support in the US, never once has a confidentiality issue come up. Our staff has an immaculate reputation. We know it is the only way to build customer relationships.
Acting any differently would instantly destroy RCS' image and kill our business altogether. If you invested in a company, would you want to see it die? Beyond ethics, it is only business logic!
Tell us about new product debuts and upgrades featured at the recent NAB 2006.
RCS literally wrote the book on music scheduling with the original Selector software. Today, because 7,000 radio stations in 94 countries use our software daily, we have a deep understanding of the needs of our customers. The new story has become universal: managing multiple channels. Radio is being asked to create more content than ever with HD and satellite channels, internet streams and consolidation, during an everstretching workday.
Dr. Andrew Economos, the creator of Selector, once again applied his science and statistical mind to turn music scheduling on its head. To give life to these new concepts, we put together the same team that created our original Selector. The result is GSelector, music scheduling reinvented...literally. It's quite revolutionary and a very different system for a new breed of talented, multitasking programmers to handle multiple channels from one music library. This saves time and creates virtually no unscheduled positions while providing more log control without setting up rules. The users tell the system what their logs must sound like and GSelector takes it from there, simply, automatically.
It is so unique we received a patent for goal-driven, demand-based music scheduling.
So, RCS invented goal-based music scheduling. What does that mean?
Every programmer has goals for their on-air sound, of course, and that's how GSelector is controlled. Programmers start with their finished log and adjust the natural demand (goals) of each song, artist or attributes like tempo, theme, sound code, as needed. That's about it, really. What makes the system revolutionary is precisely its simplicity of use.
While rewriting GSelector from scratch we modernized the architecture, leveraging Microsoft ".NET 2.0" technology so you can use it from anywhere. With one music library across an entire enterprise, song attributes only have to be entered once and can be shared by any station you manage.
GSelector schedules multiple stations using cross-station protection so two channels cannot play the same song simultaneously. The new Audio Analyzer inside GSelector identifies song parameters like energy, tempo, run time, whether an ending is cold or fade, even opening and closing musical key of the song, automatically. It can also identify multiple intros of a song.
Another significant advantage of GSelector is its availability as a barter service from Kraig Kitchin's expert team at Premiere Radio Networks.
Your Media Monitors service has captured the bulk of spot monitoring business here in the US. Why is that? What expansion of services do you expect?
The industry has made Media Monitors the leader in spot monitoring services because, as our ads say, "we know spots" (the ads feature a Dalmatian!). We have an experienced team of passionate people. The top 10 billing stations in the US and major radio groups are using one or more services from Media Monitors in multiple markets:
ABC, Bonneville, CBS Radio, Clear Channel, Entravision, Entercom, Greater Media, Susquehanna and others, researchers like Nielsen and VMS, networks like Westwood One and reps like Katz and Interep. We work with great professionals, for example, Gary Schonfeld and Jones MediaAmerica provide barter for Media Monitors services. Now that we have grown our commercial monitoring service to identifying radio spots on over 1,000 stations in the top 50 markets and print ads in major newspapers in the top 30 markets, the newest horizon for Media Monitors is television, specifically local broadcast TV and local cable.
With virtually all of radio's infrastructure digital and HD emerging, where is radio technology going and how does RCS fit in?
Radio's first mission is creating great content. Delivery methods are growing day-by-day, certainly great news for anyone with content to offer! Besides FM, AM, and HD, worldwide there is DAB, DVB-H, Visual Radio, satellite, 3G, Internet streaming (via broadband, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max) and more. For years RCS has been developing ways of taking advantage of these platform opportunities and have launched products-such as RadioShow and iSelector-ahead of the curve in providing graphical and interactive content alongside audio for a richer user experience and, most importantly, additional revenue for broadcasters.
Cellphones are becoming the center of a person's communication and entertainment universe. While phone manufacturers look at exciting new content-delivery technologies, even by utilizing plain old FM, there is still room for growth. Nokia says FM radio is one of the most popular features on a cellphone. Sixty-five percent of those with FM radios on their cellphones listen at least once a week. All this illustrates radio's most enduring quality as a uniquely portable medium; the one medium you can enjoy even while doing something else.
Good Morning - Gain a personal edge on today's business day. Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
