Slacker radio links with ABC News

Jon

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Dec 16, 2008
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]San Diego-based Slacker, the online personalized radio service backed by Mission Ventures, Austin Ventures, Centennial Ventures, Rho Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds, said Thursday that it is adding ABC News to its Slacker personal radio service. The firm said that the firm's listeners will have access to a dedicated news station including ABC News content. Slacker said the new service will feature news segments from Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, Good Morning America, Nightline, and more. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Slacker said ABC News integration is expected early this year, and will be available for unlimited access to Slacker Radio Plus subscribers, with a limited time no-cost trail for Slacker Basic Radio subscribers.
posted on Friday, January 8, 2010

Slacker Radio Links With ABC News | socalTECH.com
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DAB

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Oct 9, 2008
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Nice this is the one area that I hoped they would venture into. I am not worried about sports at all, but News and even some Talk would be nice! This is GREAT! I am sure this would just be a streaming service and would not be available for caching since it would be live.
 

Jon

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This is one thing that opens up a world of possibilities. ABC and ESPN are one company, how long before we see ESPN Radio on Slacker? Or MLB Gameday Audio through a deal with MLB?
 

DAB

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This is one thing that opens up a world of possibilities. ABC and ESPN are one company, how long before we see ESPN Radio on Slacker? Or MLB Gameday Audio through a deal with MLB?

Everything they add requires them to pay for it, so while they are heading in that direction. I think you'll see a very, very slow move this way. News is a good start and YES there are other possibilities. However, when you think about this sort of content you also have to think about additional cost to operate the service.

What I do think is a smart move is for them to start adding some content requiring a subscription. Brilliant move, which will slowly put them more and more in head to head competition with Sirius, not that they aren't already. But I mean in terms of additional content.
 

MNXMFan

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Oct 24, 2008
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They said they hoped to be profitable this year, so maybe after that we will see some more updates.

What I'd like to see is customizable top/bottom of the hour updates. You select if you want news, weather, sports scores, etc, and its delivered in any of your stations (subscription required, of course).
 

DAB

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They said they hoped to be profitable this year, so maybe after that we will see some more updates.

What I'd like to see is customizable top/bottom of the hour updates. You select if you want news, weather, sports scores, etc, and its delivered in any of your stations (subscription required, of course).

I think we'll certainly see an expansion though slowly! You can bet Pandora will be watching this model, because other than a higher bitrate, no commercials there isn't much point in paying for Pandora One as you still have limited skips etc. I think Slacker is moving in the right direction by adding content to boost their subscriber base rather than just relaying on advertising for the free service.
 

IdRatherBeSkiing

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This is one thing that opens up a world of possibilities. ABC and ESPN are one company, how long before we see ESPN Radio on Slacker? Or MLB Gameday Audio through a deal with MLB?

I doubt any deal with MLB would be cheap. MLB is not known for NOT being a bunch of greedy assholes.

Isn't this the road Sirius & XM started taking a couple of years after they came to existance? High priced content taking their focus off the music.
 

MNXMFan

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Oct 24, 2008
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Personally, I don't see sports coming to Slacker. It works better for recorded content than live stuff. ABC works, because it can be interlaced with recorded content.

But, could we see weather from The Weather Channel, or sportcenter breaks interjected in the future? Who knows!
 

DAB

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I doubt any deal with MLB would be cheap. MLB is not known for NOT being a bunch of greedy assholes.

Isn't this the road Sirius & XM started taking a couple of years after they came to existance? High priced content taking their focus off the music.

I agree with you and this is a very slippery slope that ends up costing a lot of money. If anything Slacker needs to see what jumping into the content business can do to your bottom line if you don't get enough subs in return. I don't see this happening either!

I do see them doing some news, maybe weather and even a little talk content. But beyond that! Nada!
 

xan_user

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Dec 16, 2008
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Meh, I have no need for talk of any kind on slacker. (one rason I left SatRad was subsidizing all that wasted bandwidth starting at channel 100 and above.)

But im sure some do, so its a good thing.
 

Jon

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You won't see Howard Stern on slacker after his contract is up let's put it that way. I do see more in the way of 'useful' content like the weather channel, or espn radio. Beyond that I see more focus on the music than SiriusXM. Since slacker has the ability to add music stations without removing anything else.
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Jleimer

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Oct 30, 2008
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I think Slacker is going to continue to focus on music, however since Air America is now toast they could have a progressive talk station that is internet only.
 

jduffy

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May 2, 2009
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I just received my G2 portable. I have been trying to find out how I access this new ABC News channel and have not been able to find it at the Slacker website. Anyone have any more information on this and how to access it?
 

IdRatherBeSkiing

Sherbet is NOT and NEVER WILL BE ice cream.
Oct 11, 2008
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I just received my G2 portable. I have been trying to find out how I access this new ABC News channel and have not been able to find it at the Slacker website. Anyone have any more information on this and how to access it?

I have never seen it although I am in Canada and it may be excluded.

Personally, I suspect its under the Vapourware catagory or not yet implemented.
 

DAB

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Personally, I suspect its under the Vapourware catagory or not yet implemented.

Yeah sort of like the Slacker 2 version that allows for caching of stations and the new version 2.1 released today that allows for background listening on the iPhone. All just vapourware! hehehe :D

The ABC News thing has simply not been implemented at this point!
 

IdRatherBeSkiing

Sherbet is NOT and NEVER WILL BE ice cream.
Oct 11, 2008
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Yeah sort of like the Slacker 2 version that allows for caching of stations and the new version 2.1 released today that allows for background listening on the iPhone. All just vapourware! hehehe :D

The ABC News thing has simply not been implemented at this point!

1 hour after I posted this I saw and update and clarification from RomeE on the Slacker site. They announced the co-operation with ABC but they haven't worked out the technical stuff yet. So short answer, it is in the hands of Slacker development. I am not sure one should feel comforted by that.
 

DAB

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1 hour after I posted this I saw and update and clarification from RomeE on the Slacker site. They announced the co-operation with ABC but they haven't worked out the technical stuff yet. So short answer, it is in the hands of Slacker development. I am not sure one should feel comforted by that.

It will either happen or it won't. Slacker will do what is in the best interest of their bottom line. This is as it should be. I do not think overall this is a deal breaker one way or the other.
 

RomeE

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Oct 27, 2008
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1 hour after I posted this I saw and update and clarification from RomeE on the Slacker site. They announced the co-operation with ABC but they haven't worked out the technical stuff yet. So short answer, it is in the hands of Slacker development. I am not sure one should feel comforted by that.

We have been back and forth with ABC News on the technical issues needed to make this work (Such as, we want to make sure that we can get news from them in a timely manner and put into our system so that when the news clip plays, it's not outdated already).

Since our current system is based around music, and we constantly get music from all of the different record labels, which is normally added to the system automatically in the order we get it from the labels (but we have to do some work with each file in order to categorize it into our system, etc, so it's not instantly done). But had we waited to add news in the same queue as music, then it wouldn't be fresh.

So, there has been some drastic work in order to make the news feed work properly, etc. Like any development deal between companies, there's a lot of back and forth, etc.

But that being said, we are still working on News, it's still going to be a feature in the near future, and it is not "Vaporware" 8*) I would imagine you'll hear something about News shortly (but I don't have any firm dates at this time).

Best regards,
Rome E
Slacker Support
 

jduffy

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May 2, 2009
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Meh, I have no need for talk of any kind on slacker. (one rason I left SatRad was subsidizing all that wasted bandwidth starting at channel 100 and above.)

But im sure some do, so its a good thing.

To each is own. I love talk and news radio and would welcome this on Slacker. Get tired of music all the time.
 

Jon

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Dec 16, 2008
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To each is own. I love talk and news radio and would welcome this on Slacker. Get tired of music all the time.

This would be one of the reasons I would consider coming back to XM at some point. For all the problems I had with their music selection (even before the merger after the removal of 'Luna' and XM Music Lab,) their talk and news selection is pretty unmatched. I DO have a lot of apps that supply that sort of thing on the phone, but it'll be nice to have it in the car when I'm traveling out of cellular range (Slacker Caching has that covered for the music part, if it will ever stop CRASHING!!)