Westwood One Inc., the largest radio network in the United States, is setting its sights on digital dominance, too.
The New York and Culver City-based company produces and broadcasts entertainment, news, weather, sports, talk and traffic programming to about 190 million listeners at 7,700 radio stations across the nation. The company’s revenues top $500 million each year. Now it will make its most popular shows “Randy Jackson’s Hit List,” “Loveline” and “The Osgood Files with Charles Osgood” available online through digital downloads and audio streaming as well as podcasts. In addition, the content will be available for radio and TV stations’ Web sites, PDAs and cell phones.
“We want to provide a complete bear hug for the consumer,” said Chief Executive Peter Kozann, a goal the network’s advertisers are sure to feel warm and fuzzy about.
Westwood One is America’ top provider of local traffic reports through its subsidiaries, Metro Networks, Shadow Broadcast Services and SmartRoute Systems. The digital offerings will be heavy on personalized traffic information, such as points of congestion and accidents on your route to work or home. Westwood One is working with KFWB-AM (980) in Los Angeles to provide cell phone users the opportunity to pay for on-demand traffic service within seconds. Metro Networks currently provides personalized traffic content to more than 100 radio and TV Web sites as well as digital outlets including Yahoo! Maps.
Fast and Furious
Extreme sports and video clips are red-hot these days, so why not combine the two?
An extreme sports compilation includes a series of one-minute clips of motocross, skydiving, stunt plane flying and base jumping will be available this month on cell phones through the Sprint Network. The assembly, called “Stash,” is the brainwork of Panopoly Pictures.
“It’s truly attention-deficit-disorder theater,” said Dave Riggs, Panopoly’s chief executive. “That’s exactly what it is. And to a degree, so is the Internet.”
Los Angeles-based Panopoly, winners of seven Emmy awards and six Clios, has in the past provided marketing muscle behind such films as the “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin” and “A Beautiful Mind.” The firm also provided the promotional push for DVDs that have done a combined $2 billion a year in sales.
The short form is right up Panopoly’s alley, Riggs said.
“If you look at the lineup of ‘Stash’ and the other products we sell, they’re little clips,” he said. “It’s a very short attention span. A guy will jump off a building or it’s a profile of a cute girl. You get the experience quickly.”
Query Theory
Los Angeles-based Answerbag.com, a division of Infosearch Media Inc., has a developed a Web “widget” that allows anyone to provide question and answer features on their Web sites.
The feature puts a Yahoo Answer-style Q & A; on any Web site in the form of a “widget.” Answerbag.com focuses on blogs, forums and content sites and is to tap into the popularity of Yahoo’s Answers Service, which allows anyone to post questions and provide answers to other users.
Phone Bugs
Add to the list of potentially irritating cell phone rings, “What’s up, doc?”
Warner Bros. Digital Distribution announced a deal last week with Nokia to provide Warner Bros. entertainment brand content to millions of cell phones around the world.
The deal will bring together premium and promotional content from some of the world’s most well-known brands, including Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, DC Comics and Warner Bros. films including “Dukes of Hazard” and “Batman Begins.”
Big Game
NBC drubbed the competition with its Sunday night football TV broadcast, its first featuring the former Monday Night Football hosts Al Michaels and John Madden. More than 20 million viewers tuned in.
The sales numbers for Madden’s football video game are even more impressive, at least financially. Electronic Arts Inc. said that the game grossed more than $100 million in its first week, the biggest launch in the franchise’s 17-year history.
EA, the world’s largest video game publisher, said consumers snapped up more than 2 million copies of “Madden NFL ’07 in its opening week, up 12 percent from last year’s game launch. To date, more than 53 million copies of the game have been sold.
While a handful of other game titles have had more successful openings Microsoft Corp. said its “Halo 2” game reached $125 million in sales within the first 24 hours in 2004 the through-the-roof interest in the Madden game is good news for game makers who are struggling amid a console transition period. EA, like locally based publishers THQ Inc. and Activision Inc., have seen sales suffer as consumers have delayed purchases until the expected release later this year of next-generation consoles, PlayStation 3 from Sony Corp. and Wii from Nintendo Co.
Pow-Wow Wow
Central Desktop Inc., the Pasadena-based pioneer in business software collaboration, has released a new edition of its Central Desktop Live, which allows users to schedule and conduct real-time Web conferences within Central Desktop.
“It’s about making Web collaboration affordable, not just in terms of dollars but in terms of the time necessary to get things done,” said Isaac Garcia, Central Desktop’s chief executive.
The program costs $25 per month.
Staff reporter Dan Cox can be reached at
[email protected]
or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
