Kenny Hotz has a new job and he doesn’t care if he gets fired
By Emma Teitel - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 0 Comments
A chat about his new radio show and, of course, Spenny
Kenny Hotz and Jeff Kassel in the new SiriusXM studio
Kenny Hotz is a breaker of records in (among other things) octopus wearing, semen producing, bible peddling, and gas passing. Post Kenny vs. Spenny, he’s been covering new–equally gross– ground. There was Testees, a short-lived comedy about human test subjects, Kenny Hotz’s Triumph of the Will, a reality series in which Kenny wanders a Nevada desert naked, tries to get his mother laid, and enlists a Jewish community to help him build a mosque. And now, for the first time in his career, he’s doing radio–with Testees actor, Jeff Kassel. Hotzcast, will debut this month on Sirius XM’s Laugh Attack (XM channel 160), live on Tuesdays at 5 PM ET. Kenny and Jeff will be covering politics and popular culture, with the occasional guest (including, he hopes, Martin Short some day.) Here’s Kenny Hotz on life without Spencer, Hebrew school, the NHL lockout, and his new “no mandate” radio show.
Q: Hi Kenny, how are you?
A: Surprisingly well. Still relevant, thank God. How are you? How is everyone at Maclean’s?
Q: Everyone’s fine, I think. We’re all in cubicles, so I can’t see anyone right now.
A: Yeah that’s good. You don’t wanna see those people.
Q: Tell me about your new radio show.
A: It’s funny because I’m not really a radio guy and my fans have been bugging me for years, telling me to do a podcast, but podcasts are stale and they’re dying now. But I’ve always been a really big fan of radio and I grew up with it. I’m 45 and the early part of my life I spent with headphones on in my basement listening to radio.
Q: What kind of radio?
A: Brave New Waves, 102.1, a lot of CKLN, you know, Ryerson. And then when I moved to Los Angeles I lived in a garage for five years, and it was Howard Stern every morning.
Q: Have you ever met Howard Stern?
A: No, but I heard he liked the show [Kenny Vs. Spenny].
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SiriusXM and the long road to profitability
By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments
Getty Images
Last week, SiriusXM showed off a slew of new products at an event in Toronto. The company’s new iOS and Android apps were on display. Any day now, subscribers will be getting the new app, which will finally give SiriusXM a proper tablet presence (untill now, the smartphone version has had to do). The service is also introducing a bunch of new features such as pausing music, starting a song from the beginning if you’ve tuned into it in the middle, and going back into programming by up to five hours after it’s been broadcast live.
I finally got hooked on satellite radio last year. Frustrated by the increasing number of ads and dwindling amount of music—much of which is overplayed, CanCon-enforced drivel—on the rest of radio. I haven’t looked back since. Indeed, nowadays I cringe when I get into a car without satellite radio.
It was with dismay, then, that I read a story this summer on SiriusXM’s financial troubles. The Canadian operation, majority owned by John Bitove (the same entrepreneur who runs cellphone provider Mobilicity), has asked regulators to decrease the amount of money it must funnel to Canadian content development. With losses having mounted over the seven years since Sirius and XM launched—they merged last year—is the company is in trouble?
I sat down with SiriusXM Canada chief executive Mark Redmond and discussed the company’s financial woes, as well as its general competitive situation. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation.
