This morning’s Chris Moyles Show was streamed online to allow you to see the whole show – in all it’s behind the scenes glory. And I really like it. 

On the Radio 1 site, it’s viewed via the Visual Radio Player. This allows you to see live video of the show – cut live by Radio 1’s online team plus a load of enhancements such as moderated text messages, a realtime show blog and also song details/artist biog etc which display instead of live video when the songs play. I didn’t try accessing it on my iphone and guess it may not have worked – but a mobile option would be great – particularly on the train (bandwidth issues notwithstanding).It’s an enhanced listening experience – but is it TV – or radio with pictures?

Radio1 have done this before online – and it works as an added extra – not so good if you’re on the move, but a fantastic extra, particularly for the many people listening at work – have it open on the desktop and click on it if you really want to see what’s going on. It would work especially well if  the show was live at an event – say backstage at The Brits or all weekend at Glastonbury – as an enhanced experience. 

It worked today because they did the show as normal – not really playing up to the fact to the cameras being there – and that’s the main point. This is still visualisation for radio rather than creating a TV viewing experience. But that’s not to say that radio shouldn’t be an enhanced experience. The idea of being able to listen to a station on the move, click on the application to bring up travel information or buy the song playing is available on most radio station websites. But added extras and new ways of presenting the information are all things that differentiate one station from another.Compared this to the trial last year when the Scottt Mills show ran on BBC 3 as a TV show; it worked really well – but many of the features felt like they had too many contrived visual elements.

So this is the BBC – big resources, big ideas and fairly big budgets. But what about those who need revenues to do the same? 

This application from 95.8Capitalfm does a similar thing (in smaller measures)…

Whilst it works best in a wifi area-  (data usage is quite high) – it allows you listen to the station, get “now playing information” and, really useful for a local station, live tube data and traffic camera pictures. It also allows you to switch between a number of Globalradio’s services – keeping it in the family.

Of course, if you can see the presenters doing their job on screen – how long before  video  well and truly kills the radio star? Will  “a good face for radio” still be acceptable? 🙂