In an interesting twist on public media’s push into online media, the public radio station KCRW (based in Santa Monica, CA, and the NPR flagship station for SoCal) has received $600K in grant from The Annenberg Foundation, not for its radio operations but specifically for its website. The purpose: “to develop business models to sustain the station’s webcasting activities and to further its innovative online music service.” The grant will extend over three years and will allow KCRW to experiment with a variety of online strategies, it said.
The station has been online since 1995 and has been streaming its three live feeds since 1999. Some numbers: KCRW.com generates more than 1.6 million live streaming hours per month; on-demand audio/video service received about 470K connections last month. During the same period, about 1 million KCRW podcasts were downloaded at AOL, NPR and KCRW, it said.