Tweeknotes – 14th March to 20th March

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Some fun things that have popped up on Twitter this week:

  • A piece about Private Eye’s digital strategy
  • The BBC are doing a trial of RadioVIS for their radio services. We already provide these for our clients – it’s a great way to visualise a radio station and harmonise the pictures delivered to mobile, web as well as RadioDNS-enabled radios like the Pure Sensia. It’s great to see a big broadcaster supporting it.
  • Ford have been doing some research that’s led them to bring forward the date that they’re line-fitting digital radio in their cars. Their new announcement means that all of their new cars will have DAB as standard by the end of next year.
  • There’s some more new programmes planned for Radio 4 Extra.
  • A great viral video to promote new film Limitless. Here’s the resolution.
  • A nice write up in The Guardian about the Moyles record attempt.


Tweeknotes – 7th March to 13th March

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This week, a date was announced (31st March) for the launch of the UK Radio Player, or Radioplayer as it’s now known. On that date the core partners (BBC, Global, GMG and Absolute) will go live, with the next wave, hopefully, coming a couple of weeks later. We’ve been developing player consoles for our clients and it’s been fun to see everyone’s involvement evolve over the last few weeks.

Talking to radio people outside the project, there seems to be a bit of a shrug about Radioplayer’s launch. Stations have online consoles right now, after all. It’s definitely something that only really hits you when you play with it and use search and presets, flipping between stations. It’s the most normal thing in the world to use, and crazy to think it’s taken us in radio so long to get there.

Other things that i’ve seen this week:

I’ll leave you with a brilliant perfectly on brand tweet from E4:

If your name is "next it's Friends" then yes, we do. If it isn't, then not so much. RT @Lobo_Demon Do you do shoutouts between shows?
11th March, 2011 9:48 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@E4Announcer
E4 Announcer

 

Tweeknotes – 28th February to 6th March

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This week’s notes from my twitter…

James Cridland’s written about an odd thing that the BBC Trust have said. They remarked when approving more radio series-stacking that:

1. There is a “limited amount of on-demand content offered by commercial radio”

Really? Absoloute provide thousands of hours of material and most of the big groups all do listen again.

2. “There are no known commercial radio stations that create factual or drama productions”

Except of course, the ones that do. At Fun Kids we definitely do the first and with some of the readings, arguably the second too! A bit of a poor show by the Trust.

Angelique tweeted about Pitchify, which grabs top reviews from sites like Pitchfork and then checks to see if the music’s available on Spotify. It’s something that begins to help fix one of Spotify’s few downsides – how to navigate the vast amount of material in its collection.

The BBC, this week, announced some details about Radio 4 Extra (the re-branded BBC Radio 7). I was hoping there would be more integration and counter-scheduling, but perhaps we’ll see more of that as further information is released.

Australian radio boss Duncan Campbell pointed to a great piece on talent management, there’s lots of parallels with the radio business.

One of the things that the new app stores have allowed is self-publishing content. This article talks about one young indie publisher’s success with her ebooks.

I spent five minutes fixing my Radio-Job-O-Tron this week – it’s just a simple thing that pulls radio jobs from Media UK, BBC and the Guardian and them emails them out to anyone that wants it. You can subscribe using the box on the lower right hand side of the blog.

I really enjoyed 24 Hour Panel People. It was a Comic Relief challenge for David Walliams to take part in 24hours worth of TV panel shows. They broadcast it live on the internet, with highlights to follow on BBC Three. It was a fantasitc watch, showing up many of the techniques TV uses to ‘fix’ pre-records.

If you missed it on Saturday, I also posted a link to some great Moyles audio.

Great Moyles Bit

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I was listening to Chris Moyles last Thursday and felt they did a great bit on the show which really made me chuckle on the way to the office.

It’s two links one pre-news and one post-news, where Moyles (to great comedic effect) takes issue with specialist presenters Jaymo and Andy George. I think as well as being funny, it has great radio pace.

First there’s an observation, there’s some audio, there’s a discussion, there’s some gags about it, there’s listener interaction, there’s a challenge (a hook and tease), there’s then a resolution with a demonstration (with significant technical skill) that’s funny and another gag about it before a power out into a tune.

The nature of the material also makes you really listen.

Have a listen below:

 

Tweeknotes – 21st to 27th February

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Some things that caught my tweet attention this week…

A little while back I’d heard through Piers Morgan’s relentless tweeting that he was going to be on Howard Stern’s Sirius show. I’ve really enjoyed how Piers is building awareness for himself and his new show, so managed to get hold of the audio from the interview. It’s a great listen (though 50-odd minutes long), engaging radio, with a great host and guest. You can listen to it below:

 

Tweeknotes – 14th to 20th February

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So, what have we learned this week? Well, here’s some reminders from looking at my tweet stream.

CRC in Canada continues to make great open source tools for the radio community. Their latest is the source that allows better control of radio in certain Android phones. This means that radio groups (and others) can build apps that connect to FM radio, where available – meaning bandwidth savings for listeners as they don’t need to listen to radio over the mobile network.

Later in the week, at the EBU’s digital radio conference, Global Radio’s Nick Piggott carried on the theme and talked about the need (PDF) for the radio industry to better engage with mobile phone device manufacturers to ensure there are simple, open APIs to connect to the radio functionality to allow us to create a better experience for listeners. A campaign worth support.

This week Bern Leckie questions the placement of The Breeze’s new outdoor campaign.

RAIN’s published a good round-up of the details of Pandora’s IPO which has released some interesting numbers about the service, including the fact they have a userbase of 80m, 30m of which use it weekly. James has recently posted about whether Pandora should be regarded as radio or not and perhaps that we should reclaim the word ‘radio’ from these music services.

Back at the EBU Digital Radio Conference, I spoke  about the development of commercial digital stations in UK radio. Digital is at different points across Europe and tends to be led by the public service broadcasters. You can watch the presentation, basically me slightly bumbling and then gradually warming up here. It was a good conference to be at, especially seeing what’s happening in Switzerland and Germany. All the presentations are online in presentation and video form here.

Good to see the BBC linking out to commercial broadcasters‘ on-demand offering on the iPlayer (see a search for Dancing on Ice). I’ve inquired in the past about doing the same thing for radio and was told that this would be covered in the new RadioPlayer, which indeed the new universal search will cope with. It is, however, a subtly different proposition and will no doubt ensure that the BBC won’t need to link out to commercial services near their own online radio output. It prompted me to write a bit about the work we’re doing with data.

A new national station’s coming to Digital One, it seems, with a test label of Karma, but what could it mean? Also, good to see a launch date of August this year for Germany’s new national commercial multiplex.

Success From Data

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I spend more and more of my time with data. And I love it.

Being clever and efficient is much easier if your content and any inputs/outputs of your business are structured and well described.

What does that mean? Well, I think anything that you create should be able to be used multiple times for lots of different things. If you’re a radio station you want an action, say the playing a song, to kick off a load of other things. Maybe update the website, show a link to buy tickets, show a picture of the artist, reconfigure the most played list, update an iPhone app, tell an engineer that your playout machine is still up, add a line of detail to your PRS report etc etc. This can only happen if your data is in a fit state so that other systems know what to do with it AND that it doesn’t randomly change.

I was reminded of data partly because of a new innovation in the BBC’s iPlayer. They’re now linking out to the on-demand sections of ITV, C4, C5 and other broadcasters when you do a search in iPlayer it now shows programmes from ‘other providers’.  This can only happen because the broadcasters have made their libraries of content available so iPlayer can ingest them and make searches like that work.

At the moment we’re knee-deep in UK Radio Player bits and pieces. We’re going to be providing pop-up players and power the search for a number of radio stations. But to do this we need stations to get their data in a fit state. This means good now playing information, an up to date schedule, content about on-demand items (like an interview) as well as detailed data about listen again. For many stations it’s going to be a massive change to how they work.

Why bother? Well, the benefits are potentially huge. If you’ve got Robbie Williams coming on your radio station and RadioPlayer knows about it, then a search for Robbie will highlight that. After he’s been on, make sure you’re Listen Again mentions that he popped in and that will show up as well. Chop up the interview into an on-demand piece of content, describe what he talks about and then up he’ll appear in searches for Robbie Williams, Take That and Portvale FC. This could mean more awareness for your radio station, more reach and maybe additional revenue from pre-rolls. But it only works if your data is in a fit state.

We’re spending our time building tools to make all of this easier and help you along the way. Already RadioBase takes Now Playing information and ‘harmonises’ it for spellings or odd station-specific information eg Destiny’s Child (Breakfast Edit) all gets ‘fixed’. We’ll be deploying further tools to cope with schedules and on-demand audio as well as linking your data to other interesting things – artist imagery etc that you can use all over the place.

In the meantime, have you thought about tiding up your data to get ready for these changes? What state is Selector in? Are all the artists correctly coded, is the CapITAlisatioN right? Is your playout configured so that internal data isn’t published? Is your schedule in a database that can power lots of systems? Is there anything that keeps track of where that interview is? What can you start fixing tomorrow?

In the new world, being competitive is going to mean more than just playing the right songs, it’s going to mean making sure that you’re extracting every bit of value out of every little thing that you do. It also means making sure that everyone at your station knows the value of all of this too and how they can adapt what they do to make their work even more valuable.