Interesting to see that GCap have reduced the distribution of some of their brands today by taking five off radio stations off the digital television platforms.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Core and Life - the stations that the firm declared they were 'ceasing investment' in earlier this year have disappeared as has Classic Gold (the station they're in the process of merging with Capital Gold) and Capital Disney (which was shut down last month).
What is a little surprising though is that agency favourite Chill has been removed from the TV platforms. It will be interesting to see how it affects RAJAR for the station, which has seen its audience nearly double in the past 12 months. The listeners are not happy on their MySpace page, that's for sure.
For any media owner, balancing the spending on platforms is difficult, especially when your product is still in a growth phase and platform attribution is to hard to get a handle on. The danger, however, is removing the places where your audience wants to receive you. Users are getting used to being able to consume the media they want on any platform they want. If barriers are suddenly erected to stop users getting to this content, they’ll probably just look elsewhere, but will they remember come back?
Surely, in the digital world media operators should be removing barriers to content not creating new ones?
