Wednesday, August 8, 2012

ROBBLOG #438

Small things excite small…

~ahem~

I should say- it doesn’t take much to excite me.

For instance this time of the year thinking about spending a day at the CNE excites me.
It means summer is moving along but I still look forward to going just the same.

If someone were to purchase top price tickets for me to see Barbra Streisand at the Air Canada Centre in October, I would be terribly, terribly excited.
That’s not going to happen, however.

No, small things in small categories are best at achieving some level of excitement for me.

Like seeing Hugh Jackman in the flesh and having him graciously sign an autograph across the cover of a DVD I brought along. That was a year ago and I am still buzzing with excitement!

Is there more excitement in your life- you ask?

Just, a few weeks back we retired our Surround Sound  System in favour of a Polk Audio Sound Bar with separate woofer.
Sound exciting?
Let me tell you, the sound is exciting!
No more wires along the perimeter of the room- plus an absolutely amazing sound!
The box said installation in minutes.
In reality, it took a couple of hours

Then, a week ago we purchased “Apple TV”.
Not a television but a black square about the size of a small box of Black Magic Chocolates. This would bring us You Tube Videos, Internet Radio Stations- like Swisssh & Starlite, as well as Netflix- all on our big screen TV.
We attempted to set it up by ourselves- Tom and I.
We got pretty far along before we decided to call our good friend Steve Hall for help.
Steve tried to get the job done over the phone at first but in the end he drove over from Victoria Harbour to do it. We are glad he did!
He has Apple TV and was able to get it going in an hour or so.
Good Old Mr. Hall!

Quite the product this Apple TV.
It sells for about a hundred bucks but by the time we bought an HDMI splitter box- because our TV is three years old don’t you know, it set us back an additional 200 dollars. A rather inexpensive toy turns out to be a little more expensive- yet exciting!

Anything else exciting Rob?...I hear you say.

Oh Yes!
I just ordered new “singing jingles”- for both Swisssh Radio and Starlite Radio, from the Granddaddy of Jingledom- PAMS/JAMS in Dallas Texas!
Yee-Haw!
I’ve been to Texas and they say that- and y’all too.
The cowboys say that in Alberta as well.
Yee-Haw, I mean
Y’all…not so much.

Pams Promo (Click to Listen)

PAMS and JAMS is famous the world over. The original PAMS Jingles were the jingles you heard on stations like CHUM in Toronto and CKLW in Windsor. When I listened to the packages, many were familiar. The JAMS division which I believe started in the mid 1970’s are more up to date. Jingles from both packages however, are still being recorded today.

The Jingles I chose are from such a package.
The Swisssh Jingles are from a package called “Totally Cool” The Starlite Jingles from “Great Memories”.
They are- no doubt, being used on other stations too but for Swisssh and Starlite they will sing Swisssh Radio or Starlite instead of call letters such as CSIR or CROB.
It’s not a cheap process but I hope to be able to add more jingles in the coming months.

Why didn’t I get a Canadian company to sing and produce my Jingles?
Try to find one and if you do find one- which I kind of did, they never mention prices.
PAMS/JAMS and another US-based company I contacted, all have prices displayed on their websites. So that likely means the Canadian produced Jingles would be “terribly expensive”.

I am excited and with the Canadian Buck at par- I get a fair deal!

Finally, I have to talk about Swisssh and Starlite once more. Another friend in Internet Radio- Don Andrews, had a Terrestrial radio person fill him in on the details regarding ratings and how they are achieved.
I used to work for BBM, so I know a bit.
A little bit.
Most ratings are done in ¼ segments.
It’s all based on the number of listeners who tune in and out in a ¼ hour.
In an hour.
A day.
A week.
A month.
From ratings, Rate Cards are printed and clients are charged accordingly. The most costly spots are in the morning “drive time” as we radio folks call it.
I know that up to 15,000 hours are tuned to Swisssh Radio each month- about half that for Starlite.

The past few days I have been manually counting tune INS during some hourly periods of the broadcast day.
Figuring out an average of ¼ hours over 24 hours and translating that into a week, I found than “on average” more than 2000 people tune in to Swisssh Radio during the week. Probably closer to 3000 but I want to err on the side of less- not more.
In a month those figures would mean there’s upwards of 10 thousand listeners!

That’s pretty decent for an Internet Station from Orillia, Ontario Canada. Starlite would be about half that- but growing.

That’s exciting- isn’t it?
Now, if web advertisers would only jump on the Internet Airwaves.
~sigh~

These “things” are all small things- but exiting small things- don’t you think?