After Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan, Paul Brenner is the face behind NextRadio. It’s Brenner’s job to get NextRadio in the hands of every consumer by getting NextRadio on every smartphone. Smulyan says, “Paul is not only a brilliant technologist, but a terrific leader and partner who is making a difference in the lives of every broadcaster.” Brenner is the cover story interview in the current issue of Radio Ink magazine. Brenner tells the story of a meeting with Apple’s Steve Jobs that did not go as well as it could have.
Brenner says NextRadio was born out of this idea of the power of a unified industry. “Looking back on the BTC (Broadcast Traffic Consortium), what did we do right, what did we do wrong there? And then thinking about FM in the smartphone. We knew the FM smartphone was there; we knew the chip was in the phone, based on some consultant information. It came out of this idea of developing a thing that can be a unified industry effort.”
Well as everyone knows the industry is not always 100% unified. Some companies have their own plans on how to accomplish their goals with their radio assets and that doesn’t always mesh with what the industry is focused on.
Brenner talks about how and why the FM Chip became a priority for the industry back then. “This is a conversation with people inside of Emmis and the NAB, getting this kind of conversation loop going. It resulted in a prototype with handset maker ZTE that was really about activating a tuner, but also presenting something that was very supportive of the industry in total. That was really the goal from the outset, to make something where, yeah, you can turn on the chip, but if you’re going to make a difference for the industry, everyone has an equal footprint in the app, and the content is engaging and gives radio something new to work with as an industry. We did the cloud part of this, the TagStation that ties the content to the app, in 2008. And then the app itself and the work on the prototype started in 2010. A little bit of strange history: The cloud version, TagStation, the thing that feeds NextRadio the synchronous content for the radio station, was actually the white-label song tagging for Apple’s iTunes Store.”
Brenner says that product was written with Apple, with the intention of helping the industry support the FM-enabled iPod and that was presented to then-CEO Steve Jobs.
Brenner wasn’t in the room during the presentation with Jobs, but he knows how the meeting turned out. “It was one of those early things, that Apple really was very disappointed that the radio industry, in total, didn’t support song tagging for the FM iPod. To this day, it kind of haunts us that we didn’t come through on that. But the platform, we just basically reinvented it and focused on its purpose for connecting to radio stations with serving the NextRadio app, as opposed to the FM-enabled iPod.”
Brenner explains what song-tagging was all about. “FM-enabled iPods were something that Apple brought to the market and said that if you were listening to local radio through your iPod, you could press a “Tag” button. And then when you connected your iPod to your computer, the iTunes Store would automatically put those songs you tagged into your shopping cart. There were 25 companies in the discussions out at Cupertino at Apple’s offices, and they asked us to support it, and everybody said they would. But, at the end of the day, only a couple of companies did — a handful, maybe three or four. Apple didn’t really appreciate that. The song tagging and the link-share business just went away.”
And Brenner thinks that was a mistake. “In everything that I work on, whether it is BTC or that opportunity with Apple, an outsider to the industry always has doubts about the radio industry’s ability to unify and to do some type of innovative development that requires everyone to support it and everyone to act in a common way. That holds true with everything that I’ve worked on. I think Apple was one of those moments where we could’ve all done ourselves a lot of good by doing something all the same and showing a technology giant like Apple that it’s possible. And we didn’t. I think, to this day, that haunts us.”
Learn more about NextRadio HERE
Reach out to Paul Brenner at NextRadio at [email protected]
Read our cover story interview with Paul Brenner HERE
Get the entire 8/22/2016 Digital Issue of Radio Ink Magazine by becoming a subscriber HERE
