Over the July 4th weekend, Anthony Cumia of the long-running “Opie and Anthony” radio show was fired from SiriusXM, where they have been since being kicked off terrestrial radio.
For the point I am going to share, why he was fired and/or the question of if he should have been terminated in the first place are irrelevant. There’s plenty of discussion about that elsewhere on the Internet.
The question I am bringing up is if O&A (as they are sometimes abbreviated) could bring their brand of talk to their own online channel, independent of a major communications company like SiriusXM or CBS (where the duo previously resided).
The closest equivalent at the moment are brands in the video space, particularly Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze”. Beck, formerly of Fox News, and CNN before that, has an online over the top channel with his show and similar content. There are reports that The Blaze is underfunded and unprofitable, but that is a discussion for another time.
I myself am a subscriber to SiriusXM, particularly for the Jam_On channel. I have fantasized about creating a competitor to it, but the headaches of music licensing put a stop to that. Pandora and Spotify reportedly pay most of their revenue to licensing agencies, far more than SiriusXM and terrestrial radio stations.
Talk radio doesn’t have those huge licensing liabilities. Blogtalkradio is a service that has been around for almost a decade, hosting professional semi-pro and amateur talk radio shows. No licensing = less problems. I’m surprised that there are not competitors to BTR in the nice successful niche they created for themselves.
Could an online-only paywalled radio network launch with Opie and Anthony leading the way? Possibly. Will they (or someone else) start one? Only time will tell…