Foundation Journal

Seems simple enough -- a broadcast radio outlet tries out a new medium like video. Several area radio stations have wandered into the video world with varying success and for various reasons as outlined here. Since the stations -- 96.5 The Buzz , a commercial station; KKFI 90.1 FM , a community station, 90.9 The Bridge , an affiliate of KCPT-TV; and KDHX 88.1 in St. Louis -- all rely on advertising, underwriting, or listener donations for support, so one reason for delving into video is to attract more "paying customers" to their radio broadcasts. Another reason is to connect with people in social media spaces they prefer, especially around music. Any media outlet paying attention to trends in radio and social media would be well-advised to tap into new media in order to maintain their financial base. The problem with this approach is that listeners have many alternative outlets -- for example, Pandora or Apple's newer streaming radio service -- for their listeni...

Social and new media pivots around simple concepts -- such as "try out new tools, even at the risk of failing." For KKFI 90.1 FM community radio, which devotes so much energy to creating traditional broadcast media, all produced by volunteer programmers, there's no time for testing the waters of media innovation. But try is what they've done recently -- and not once, but twice. KKFI recently purchased equipment to broadcast live audio events from a remote site, and tried it out at the 2014 Folk Alliance International conference held in Kansas City, Missouri, February 19-22, 2014. With the help of videographer Rick Groom the station also live video-streamed seven hours of music performances. I am going to tell you about how the station video-streamed the performances. The radio station had several options to live stream the video , but chose YouTube Live Events as the outlet. The choice made sense because KKFI already had a YouTube Channel with 39 videos, 12,000 v...