4:52am. Monday morning. Station manager Debbie texted me late last night about producer Ryan.
Ryan texted me to get a producer for the morning. He needs the day off. I don't know who I will get this late.
At 11pm on a Sunday, Debbie tried to get someone. No go.
I can do this one solo, I eventually texted back. So here we are. I haven't done the show solo in a long time, years. It's a Monday in the middle of summer and let's see how that goes. I don't have a ton to talk about so I'll just plod through on wit and situational humor. Hmm. Start thinking about funny shit that happened at my family stuff yesterday. Hmm... not much there. The weather. Politics. US Open. Festivals. Pizza.
Shit, it's the middle of summer and not a lot happening. This should be good.
Ryan texted me to get a producer for the morning. He needs the day off. I don't know who I will get this late.
At 11pm on a Sunday, Debbie tried to get someone. No go.
I can do this one solo, I eventually texted back. So here we are. I haven't done the show solo in a long time, years. It's a Monday in the middle of summer and let's see how that goes. I don't have a ton to talk about so I'll just plod through on wit and situational humor. Hmm. Start thinking about funny shit that happened at my family stuff yesterday. Hmm... not much there. The weather. Politics. US Open. Festivals. Pizza.
Shit, it's the middle of summer and not a lot happening. This should be good.
 6:45am - the nicest man on planet earth. Wes Lukoshus, Purdue Cal |  8:55am - Have no fear, Savoir Faire is here... Mike Barancik |
Noon. Reviewing some morning show listener texts:
Grease only accounts for 1% of the European GDP stop spreading fear that the European debt will ruin our economy please research this and reassure the American investors that it will not affect them
Bowling is an old man sport!
It don't matter what your excuse is... I wouldn't be able to hear you anyway... Your app Ain't working
Does your phone app for android samsung not work?
Grease only accounts for 1% of the European GDP stop spreading fear that the European debt will ruin our economy please research this and reassure the American investors that it will not affect them
Bowling is an old man sport!
It don't matter what your excuse is... I wouldn't be able to hear you anyway... Your app Ain't working
Does your phone app for android samsung not work?
| |  2pm. nephew Jack being cool, station manager Debbie Wargo fixing the log |
7:32pm and I really don't know why I put all this shit on a page. There's a reason somewhere. I just haven't yet figured out what it is.
As far as some radio shit, I finally figured out a couple things about streaming our audio. As summary, we signed up with a company called Boost Media Entertainment (not that other Boost mobile, which is Sprint's division for cheap phones and service). We signed up with Boost in 2012 or so because they had a really cool thing called MyStationApp. I saw this at one of Radio Ink's conferences. Boost actually designed an app specifically for the conference. They could have called it MyConferenceApp.
Actually, they could have called it anything they wanted to because in the end the company seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. One minute they're offering a radio station a way to create their own app... and they're all involved with Radio Ink... and the next minute you can't find any of the three Jasons who ran the thing, not even Jason Zickler who seemed to be in charge. Go ahead, try to Google MyStationApp. They've got a twitter they haven't updated since June, 2013, which must be when they checked out.
Now I understand that venture capital money comes in and changes your business direction....
As far as some radio shit, I finally figured out a couple things about streaming our audio. As summary, we signed up with a company called Boost Media Entertainment (not that other Boost mobile, which is Sprint's division for cheap phones and service). We signed up with Boost in 2012 or so because they had a really cool thing called MyStationApp. I saw this at one of Radio Ink's conferences. Boost actually designed an app specifically for the conference. They could have called it MyConferenceApp.
Actually, they could have called it anything they wanted to because in the end the company seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. One minute they're offering a radio station a way to create their own app... and they're all involved with Radio Ink... and the next minute you can't find any of the three Jasons who ran the thing, not even Jason Zickler who seemed to be in charge. Go ahead, try to Google MyStationApp. They've got a twitter they haven't updated since June, 2013, which must be when they checked out.
Now I understand that venture capital money comes in and changes your business direction....
Now I understand that venture capital money comes in and changes your business direction. Happens all the time. But I had developed a relationship with these three Jasons. WJOB became one of their first few stations to purchase the app, and we worked hard with them to develop it so that you could with one click watch or listen to our content. You'd go to their website and there we'd be - a shining example of a local radio station using MyStationApp. I'd even go down to Indy to meet with them in their trendy loft space. .
Then one day they were gone. No call, email, press release. Poof. A tactic that I personally used many times in my life. The quick exit. But whereas I used it often to exit from a relationship with a woman, they used it to exit from a relationship with a client. Same difference, I suppose.
So where does that leave WJOB and its digital counterpart, JED.tv?
Lost. The funny thing is that up until a couple of weeks ago, you could download the app - a couple thousand people have - and click listen and you could hear me say All right, all right, pretty good, pretty good. Pretty neat, pretty neat. But how that app kept streaming our shit for two years after the Boost Media Entertainment company seemingly vanished - I have no fucking idea. It's a mystery. We send our encoded audio to a place in California. That streaming company (Streamguys) then makes spots available for people to listen to our content - or for other restreaming companies such as tunein.com to restream the streamguys stream which they get from us streaming it in the first place.
It's confusing, for sure, but what's most perplexing is that long after MyStationApp evaporated into the cloud, you could still download the WJOB single-station app from Play or Apple... and the app would work. There must be a server somewhere that one of the Jasons left plugged in down in a basement somewhere... with the internet still connected. Beats the hell outta me.
... It makes sense that the three Jasons might exit the one station - one app business. As cool as our app is, or was, it's really a lot cooler for a user to go to an "aggregating" app to see hundreds of stations listed in one place, i.e. iHeart radio, Radio.com, tunein.com and a whole bunch of others, including iTunes. We have posted our stream at tunein.com. It works fine, if you can get people to go the site. There's just so many people who click on our app, see that it doesn't work, and then they move on. In a way, it's a curse that we had the app in the first place because people won't go looking for our stream on wjob1230.com or jed.tv.
Enough of this geeky shit. Or maybe not. I fiddled around with the streaming today and got it to work on both itunes and tunein.com. So if you look on the front page of jed.tv you'll see that you have two options to stream. Click the first one and if that doesn't work, click the second. That's the best I can do for now.
... This all begs the question if we should just take down the app from iTunes store and Google Play. I don't know. Apple approved us a long time ago, and it's unclear if they still approve apps for a single station. I've read that they much prefer aggregating apps. Android might be a little easier to reapply for an app if we ever want one. But who knows?
So at this point we're looking for someone who really knows apps and who might be able to locate the code for the original app. If that's the case, maybe we will press on with our station-specific app. Maybe we could somehow still stream audio from the app and maybe we can post my blog that nobody reads there. Podcasts, blog, photos, videos, live audio streaming, live video streaming. All the shit you see here, maybe we can get it on an app and then we can have even more shit that nobody reads... or listens to or views.
Anyways, it's very nearly the latest sunset of the year and I'm thinking of doing some JEDgolff... which is a whole 'nother confusing story I'll tell you later sometime.
Then one day they were gone. No call, email, press release. Poof. A tactic that I personally used many times in my life. The quick exit. But whereas I used it often to exit from a relationship with a woman, they used it to exit from a relationship with a client. Same difference, I suppose.
So where does that leave WJOB and its digital counterpart, JED.tv?
Lost. The funny thing is that up until a couple of weeks ago, you could download the app - a couple thousand people have - and click listen and you could hear me say All right, all right, pretty good, pretty good. Pretty neat, pretty neat. But how that app kept streaming our shit for two years after the Boost Media Entertainment company seemingly vanished - I have no fucking idea. It's a mystery. We send our encoded audio to a place in California. That streaming company (Streamguys) then makes spots available for people to listen to our content - or for other restreaming companies such as tunein.com to restream the streamguys stream which they get from us streaming it in the first place.
It's confusing, for sure, but what's most perplexing is that long after MyStationApp evaporated into the cloud, you could still download the WJOB single-station app from Play or Apple... and the app would work. There must be a server somewhere that one of the Jasons left plugged in down in a basement somewhere... with the internet still connected. Beats the hell outta me.
... It makes sense that the three Jasons might exit the one station - one app business. As cool as our app is, or was, it's really a lot cooler for a user to go to an "aggregating" app to see hundreds of stations listed in one place, i.e. iHeart radio, Radio.com, tunein.com and a whole bunch of others, including iTunes. We have posted our stream at tunein.com. It works fine, if you can get people to go the site. There's just so many people who click on our app, see that it doesn't work, and then they move on. In a way, it's a curse that we had the app in the first place because people won't go looking for our stream on wjob1230.com or jed.tv.
Enough of this geeky shit. Or maybe not. I fiddled around with the streaming today and got it to work on both itunes and tunein.com. So if you look on the front page of jed.tv you'll see that you have two options to stream. Click the first one and if that doesn't work, click the second. That's the best I can do for now.
... This all begs the question if we should just take down the app from iTunes store and Google Play. I don't know. Apple approved us a long time ago, and it's unclear if they still approve apps for a single station. I've read that they much prefer aggregating apps. Android might be a little easier to reapply for an app if we ever want one. But who knows?
So at this point we're looking for someone who really knows apps and who might be able to locate the code for the original app. If that's the case, maybe we will press on with our station-specific app. Maybe we could somehow still stream audio from the app and maybe we can post my blog that nobody reads there. Podcasts, blog, photos, videos, live audio streaming, live video streaming. All the shit you see here, maybe we can get it on an app and then we can have even more shit that nobody reads... or listens to or views.
Anyways, it's very nearly the latest sunset of the year and I'm thinking of doing some JEDgolff... which is a whole 'nother confusing story I'll tell you later sometime.
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