WYBE Philly's Weird Business Model
Interesting story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the tiny non-profit station WYBE airing five-minute shorts that would-be producers pay to have on the air. The station charges a yearly fee ranging from $75 for individuals and $1,000 for corporations to help them get their ideas to air.
"It’s short-form programming, in which we let the community come to us and let them and viewers tell us what they want," says Howard Blumenthal, the station’s chief executive.
Blumenthal alternately refers to the programming as "Sesame Street for grown-ups" and the early days of MTV. He stresses that it is not infomercials, and that the station can kibosh any content–say, racist propaganda–they feel is inappropriate.
You can see the new lineup at www.mindtv.org: It’s "a grab-bag of museum-exhibit tours and Christian rappers, tattooed performance artists, and a green-building primer by local corporate landlord Liberty Property Trust."
Silvana commented:
I glanced at it and looks good so far. It skips over some tpiocs which I wish he had talked about, but how can I complain when it is free? I have worked with WPF and .net since they were first introduced and I'm really enjoying WP7 programming even with all the holes it has as of now. It is leaps and bounds beyond apple and google's platforms in terms of ease of development that it really speaks volumes to what the difference is between a new platform from an experiended platform vendor (Microsoft) instead of newcomers to the platform game like google and apple. I do miss some of the capabilities missing from regular .net which seems to have been trimmed due to time, but I suspect microsoft will keep adding more and more very fast like they did with silverlight.
Bartu commented:
She has a guaranteed $50,000 catrnoct for two years...I know many people who work at WISN radio...Jerry Bott is the program director...and he is the only person who wanted this contest to happen...now they are going to pay for it...for two years anyway...