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Why we invested (again) in Stitcher Radio

Stitcher Radio announced today the closing of its Series B round of funding, lead by Benchmark.  We added to our Series A investment with more dollars in this round and I thought it would be worthwhile explaining why we choose to invest again in Stitcher and what we consider the bid idea.

Many of you may have already used Stitcher.  Many more (over 40MM people in fact) have used Pandora.  The easiest way to describe Stitcher is to say that it Pandora for news and talk radio.  Stitcher is basically an on-demand news and talk audio listening platform that allows you to listen to the programs you want when and where you want them.  News and talk is close to 50% of listening time while driving in the US.

I am sure that most of you can relate to my frustrations while listening to radio.  Most of my listening time happens in the car.  I don’t always commute or drive at the same time, so I can’t listen to the same programs.  And in any case, many of the programs I enjoy are not played anywhere near my commuting times.  For example, I enjoy PRI’s ”This American Life”, which at my local NPR station, WAMU, plays at 12 noon on Saturdays.   “Car talk,” another fun show on NPR, plays at 10am on Saturdays.  I also enjoy listening to Neil Cavuto’s show, but that is on Fox News at 4pm.  Why shouldn’t I be able to listen to those programs whenever I want them?  This time and place shifting is already happening on TV.  Satellite Radio held the promise of unlimited station selections, yet it is still dependent on the same broadcast model of traditional radio.

Stitcher aims to change all that.  We think Stitcher Radio could become the digital radio platform of the 21st century.  Behind the scenes, it aggregates an endless list of programming content and makes it available through a smart content discovery interface.  It then allows me to build a list of my favorite shows that essentially becomes my own radio station.  In the morning, when I get in the car, I can then start my station on my own schedule: I can listen to the Techcrunch headlines from the night before, the 5 minute summary of latest news from CNN and NPR, etc.

From a user’s perspective this seems like a no-brainer, right?  So, a natural question is why hasn’t anyone else done this before?  The answer is that a few things were missing.  First, there was no device that consumers carried around with an easy interface for listening to media.  That changed with the iphone.  Also, before 3G the bandwidth was largely not available to offer an economically viable service of this kind.  These were the things that prevented this from being possible.  But these were necessary, but not sufficient conditions.  Why?  Because a lot of work needs to go into making the service as easy as possible.  We have all been conditioned to get in the car, press one button and just listen to the radio.  Nothing more to that.  Really easy.  Well, the same needs to happen with the on-demand service.  As it turns out it takes a lot of work to make it intuitive.  An example of how Stitcher hopes to do that is the partnership with Ford to allow control of the app from within the car controls.  This is just the beginning, but gives you an idea of the kinds of things that Stitcher is working on to make Stitcher Radio the one button solution to listening to the content you want whenever you want it.