Earlier this week, I mentioned how some media outlets completely biffed the end of the Howard Stern Show on Siruis XM radio. For too many reasons, they insisted the show was coming to an end. Instead, Sirius renewed Stern’s contract for another three years.
That post led a buddy who is an industry veteran (Fox, Bloomberg, NBC) to share a widely overlooked aspect of The Stern Show: How innovative the technology it developed was.
Many things we take for granted today were created for various incarnations of his E! show:
“A lack of appreciation — a Moore’s Law byproduct, I suppose — that anyone has for how difficult it once was to film three headphone-wearing idiots sitting around EV microphones.
When MSNBC launched Imus in the Morning on TV, it was a feat of broadcast engineering spearheaded by a team of savvy technicians at NBC. People fail to appreciate just how difficult it was back then to account for all the technical limitations of broadcasting live on two different linear platforms for several hours every day.
Some of those same engineers designed the studio for Imus on Fox Business, and it was ahead of its time (Circa 2008)…it wasn’t Apollo 13, but it was certainly innovative.
When Stern did the deal with E! for the late-night cable TV replay, it was a game-changer and probably one of the first tangible examples of Video on Demand profitability from a daily/live program. It’s so easy these days to set up two iPhones, stream it into the cloud, then pull down the footage to edit and push to YouTube — but find me the one influencer/online content guru who recognizes just how much Stern (and Imus) paved the way for them to not have a real job?
I suppose in music, a guitarist of today’s vintage would recognize the contribution of past eras….Hendrix, Clapton, Beck, etc., but with the proliferation of online content, everyone living high off digital ads and millions of views seems to have forgotten who made it all possible…”
This is especially true for me personally: I saunter into the studio, and take for granted that we have a) a full team of rock stars ready to record, b) on the latest cutting-edge equipment, c) which is then professionally edited.
It is very easy to take things for granted and not realize where all the wonderful, enabling technology we use originated. The early days in every field were filled with clever people working with limited budgets and cobbled-together-tools to do and create things that had never been done before…
Previously:
Nobody Knows Anything, Howard Stern Edition (December 30, 2025)
