Celebrating ten years of episodes in the party bus

• How to celebrate ten-years of podcasting episodes? For Too Beautiful To Live, the answer is a 24-hour live-streamed podcast episode from a party bus, driving all round Washington state, USA.

• Amazon has just announced that their Amazon Echo smart speakers will be launched in Australia on 1 February. You can pre-order now - the Echo Dot is AUD $49, significantly under-cutting the Google Home Mini’s AUD $79 price. (As a reminder: podcasts on these devices are powered by TuneIn).

  
  Jul 29 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Futuri Media, a broadcasting technology company based in Cleveland OH, USA has signed US broadcaster Alpha Media for, among other things, their POST product “which instantly turns broadcasts into PPM-encoded on-demand audio”. Alpha Media has 228 stations across the US.

• A podcast for managers, Manage Smarter, has launched. It’s branded content from SalesFuel, who offer tools for salespeople. “Good managers improve numbers. But great managers improve people, their most important asset. This podcast is a way to expand the skills and thinking of leaders who are interested in truly learning new ways to manage that move the needle toward more positive results.”

• Event - in The Frontline Club in London UK, a Workshop: Advanced Podcasting – How to Make Online Audio Work, on 2nd March, with Earshot Strategies.

• Kids radio station Kinderling, in Sydney NSW, Australia, is delighted that their new podcasts The Beanies Imagination Station (reported on Dec 14), and Bedtime Explorers have both managed to make it to #1 in the iTunes Kids & Family chart this week.

• YouTube makes significant changes to their monetisation platform: they now require creators to have, at a mimimum, 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past twelve months: otherwise they will no longer share revenue. In a discussion on Reddit, one Redditor makes the point that this probably ensures quality content for advertisers. (Of interest: 4,000 hours of watchtime will reward creators who make longer videos).

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Jul 29 2023

Thank you to RadioPublic for joining as a silver supporter.

I’m in Vancouver BC, Canada on 30 and 31 January. Want to meet up? Get in touch.

Disclosures - the author was on Futuri Media’s advisory board in 2015, and let Kinderling Kids Radio buy me a coffee last year.