Radio

Absolute Get it Wight

| jamesstodd
Image from www.absoluteradio.co.uk
Image from http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk

Do you picture this lot as typical listeners of Absolute Radio?

Last week, I wrote about Capital FM’s coverage of their excellent Summertime Ball, and how the online offering was a little lacking for the tech savvy, online audience. I also hoped that Absolute Radio’s forthcoming coverage of the Summer’s festivals would prove that online content can be engaging, fun and also in some cases perception shifting. Having photos of listeners like those above helps them shift perceptions from being a blokey station to having a wider audience profile.

To me, Absolute’s coverage of this weekend’s Isle of Wight Festival punched well above its weight. Not only were there tons of photos posted during the weekend – both official and user generated. But there was a fair degree of interaction with their audience away from the event.

Via twitter, I got updates on when the acts were onstage and when new content was available online.

photo

I also got a few updates live onsite from reporter Andrew Bailey via Audioboo

This was rough and ready live reportage – giving a bonus behind the scenes feel to the coverage. For the station – it was simple to create – needing just an iphone and a free program -plus the simple know-how to link to it via various platforms.

In addition, the audio from a number of stage performances is online – not with video but with photo slideshows. This again was something that could be achieved fairly easily with fewer resources needed than creating full video packages. It was also supplemented by video interviews by the key artists.

The beauty of Absolute Radio’s coverage however is how every piece of content is neatly tagged – so that music fans can search for their favourite band and easily find all the relevant content from them. Searching on Stereophonics for example brings you the backstage interview from the festival, plus backstage interviews from a couple of other events. Alongside that, there’s an artist biog and links to buy songs. But more importantly, a link to the 1,189 other Absolute Radio VIPs who also like the band – allowing more interaction and enhancing the station’s online community.

Having seen this offering, I’ll be interested in seeing what they continue to offer across the Summer of Live.

And this is how they did it..

Audioboo – Instant reporting for radio?

| jamesstodd

I came. across AUDIOBOO by chance following a Twitter from James Cridland, one of the BBC’s online gurus.

Essentially it’s an online audio blogging tool – currently available as a free application from the Itunes store for iPhone, but I’m sure that will change rapidly.

photo

Essentially, the application lets you record audio on your iphone. You can’t edit it – but you can pause, then resume. Once you’re finished, you can upload it. However, you can also add information – maybe a picture of who you are recording or where you are. Since it’s recorded on the iphone, it also adds a GPS tag of where it is recorded. You can also tag the recording with keywords. Then, when you are finished, you hit publish, and it goes straight up to the audio boo website front page for anyone to hear. It’s simple and at present, you can’t make the recording private. You can publish anonymously – or linked to a user account (where you can manage /delete your audio). At first I couldn’t really see the point; there are loads and loads of posts, mostly strange or dull, or even just bizarre (like my test recording last night of the sounds you hear walking from Charing Cross to Embankment tube…)
embankment

[Audio http://blog.jamesstodd.com/page5/assets/Audioboo_walk.mp3%5D

So what does this mean for radio? Well, it depends on what you want from it to be honest. The quality is fairly good for a phone based recorder – but the ability to get audio online or even back to base quickly may outweigh any slight quality concerns. The example post above (from journalist Matthew Weaver) is one of his recordings from The Guardian’s blog coverage of the G20 summit.  He didn’t use everything he recorded – but then again, you wouldn’t use everything you recorded as a journalist.

[Audio http://blog.jamesstodd.com/page5/assets/Audioboo_obama.mp3%5D

Of course, The Guardian isn’t a radio station – but as mentioned before in my Twitter feed, they have 8 radio studios onsite – so the multimedia offering is increasingly important to them. In this case, they could have someone on the ground, recording audio and blogging, and then have it all tidied up on site.

For a radio station – particularly one on a tight budget, this is a method of allowing a journalist to be on site, to record an item in pretty good quality, and then to post the audio with nothing more than the click of a button. Now of course, at the moment, this audio is available for anyone to hear – so maybe each recording needs to start with “I’m XXXX for Badger FM onsite at xxxx before getting into the audio – thus tagging the audio with your station name. However, once it’s uploaded, it just needs someone back at base to find it, download it and if necessary delete it. Since you can also take a photo to upload with the audio, and later download it – you also have a way of not only getting audio content for a news bulletin up to the site, but also a picture of the event for the website. All the audio can be downloaded – either directly from the site into itunes, or by grabbing it via the RSS feed.

And of course, since your listeners have phones, the ability to make use of the resource of citizen journalists at a big event or news story is immensely useful.  Think about what you could get from listeners at a big music festival – or caught up in big travel chaos when the snow comes agin – or maybe on the day when school exam results come out. Get them to record audio and post it – you never know what great content you may get from it. Since the site lets you publish your updates directly to your Twitter account, I guess there’s a fairly easy way to tag these Tweets and aggregate them into one place. I’m sure there are people out there who could explain this aspect far more concisely than me…:-)

So, if you have an iphone, grab the application and give it a go. record something meaningful, or something bizarre. You never know who’ll be listening.

 

UPDATE:

Here’s how Richard Bacon is using it to interact with his listeners on 5 Live

BJ – Legendary Voiceover -RIP

| jamesstodd

 

1220623279_l

I read with sadness this morning via Radio Today  the news this morning that the legendary american voiceover Brian James – much used in radio station imaging in the UK in the late 80s and 90s – has died.

To me, he epitomised the sound of large market radio in the UK, when stations were striving to emulate the big American sound. He was the voice used on stations such as Capital FM in the early 90s and created a high energy powerful sound.

[Audio http://blog.jamesstodd.com/page5/assets/CapitalMusicPower.mp3%5D

Whilst I never had the pleasure of working with him, I had the pleasure of creating the odd bit of production featuring his voice – and it was one of those voices that was easy to use – mainly because he knew just how to deliver the lines.

RIP Brian.

U2 Buy The BBC?

| jamesstodd

So, U2=BBC. A brilliant marketing coup for a record label and band. Or a misuse of a publicly funded broadcasting organisation’s airwaves and webspace?

Image (C) BBC
Image (C) BBC

Let’s get one thing clear. I’m a massive U2 fan – and thought the whole concept was fantastic. And it worked on so many levels. From the Culture Show to Radio 1 to Radio 4’s “Front Row” to the rooftop gig. I’m not complaining – I got a text from a friend around 6pm and managed to get to near the front – an almost perfect start to a weekend.

U2 on the rooftop (they're where the bright lights are..:-) )
U2 on the rooftop (they're where the bright lights are..:-) )

But predictably, there were many people not so pleased with it including Tory MP Nigel Evans who complained (to the Daily Mail under a headline of “The Bono Broadcasting Corporation”) about why licence fee payers should pick up the cost of publicity of the new U2 album. For the BBC, this will have been about delivering something exceptional for the audience (not all, but a wide part of it) and it was able to tick many boxes. It was a subject that had a broad fanbase which enabled the project to be spread across 2 music networks and the speech network. It allowed some innovative online ideas from Red Button coverage to online microsites. And quite probably will have bought audiences into programmes that they might not necessarily have sampled before (such as The Culture Show and Front Row). Added to that – it created a couple of one off musical events that people can say “only the BBC can do that” – all things that should keep the BBC Trust happy.

As a licence fee payer, I’m more than happy for this to have happened – as part of what the BBC’s remit is to me. I don’t want to watch or listen or read about everything that they broadcast or publish. I have no real interest in Antiques or horesracing but I don’t have a problem with the BBC covering either of those subjects. And I can add it to the list of shared musical experiences where I can say “I was there”.

Of course, the BBC’s commercial competitiors (and I used to work for one) constantly bemoan the fact that this is the sort of thing they’d like to have done if they had the resources or the budget or similar. But quite often it’s the case that they quite simply don’t have the ingenuity to think of it. As I’m now coming to expect, Absolute Radio did a sound job of covering the U2 album too (with far fewer resources and no less quality). As a fan, I’ve downloaded the podcast and will devour their video special when it’s online too (made on a far smaller budget no doubt).

So did the BBC give over their airwaves to publicise a record. Not really. They were presented with a unique opportunity to create a wide range of content with one of the most popular bands in the world. To have turned it down would have failed me as  a licence fee payer.

I just hope the album is worth the wait…

School Closures on the Radio

| jamesstodd

This article was written during a snow event in 2009.

If you have arrived here looking for school closures in 2013, your first ports of call should be
Uk wide: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/hi/default.stm
South / Southwest: http://thebreeze.com
And don’t forget, you can hear the radio on the move for free with the UK Radioplayer App

————-

As expected, the slightest hint of snow and London ground to a halt.

And so to the feverish task this morning of trying to find out if my daughter’s school was closed. A check on the school website…nothing. A check on the BBC London website…nothing. A check on Capital FM’s website…(shows how much great travel content was on there – but no school closures)….more than nothing (briefly at around 7.30am).

capital

I’m pretty sure Capital and BBC london would have wanted to carry this information – so why nothing…?

I searched for school closures – and up popped BBC Kent and the most comprehensive one – Invicta fm…

invicta

So where did my local council (the London Borough of Bromley) suggest I looked online? Nowhere. Their advice was to tune into Time FM.

Timefm – a small South London station were manfully trying to keep up to date answering the phones, and reading out as many school closures as possible – and taking calls from listeners and generally doing what a real local radio station should do. They seemed to have updates on their site – but that seemed to crash a lot. But they got the job done this morning.

Now, one suspects, there was a decision taken somewhere in London at some point to delegate out the provision of school closures to the ultra local radio stations – but in this hooked -up online age – surely there could be a system where the London councils could co-ordinate the information – to be available for all to see – either specifically tailored as a real time feed to all council sites – or equally – to be available on the otherwise excellent travel coverage on sites such as capitalfm.co.uk .

I guess it shows how much we’ve come to rely on websites for information – but it was reassuring to know that stations such as LBC and Capital, plus the small ones like Timefm – could still step up to the job and give me all the information I needed.

UPDATE:

These 2 blogs have interesting takes on the subject from the Surrey and Northumberland

UPDATE December 2010

So more snow hits the UK – and predictably London is at a standstill again. My daughter’s school still don’t add anything to the website, but texted us. The college my wife works at added a closure to the front page of it’s website.

On the radio, Capital FM has links to all the councils in London and had detailed travel news on their site. BBC London were on top of the travel news and they too had links to all the council websites.

And of course – there’s always TWITTER – nice use of a hashtag from BBC Surrey

;

I Want it All. I Want It Now. UPDATE

| jamesstodd

Ok.

So I wanted it all – when I wanted it. So maybe it’s a pipe dream.

However – I can do some of it – sort of – and certainly on my iPhone on an app I randomly came across called Stitcher

moylesphoto

It’s basically allows you to stream podcasts  – at the touch of the button – categorised by genre, subject and even brand. So you’ll find loads of BBC content  plus stuff from ABC, CBS, CNN, and pretty much everything else. And it does it over wifi and also when you’re out of a wifi hotspots (though not sure how your battery or data consumption will like it). Basically it pulls together loads of podcasts – but you can listen without downloading. 

Searching just now, I’m randomly listening  to KNX 1070 Notable News from Los Angeles – so for the sheer geek  factor of almost live radio from anywhere in the world – this is great. In fact – a lot of the U.S stations seem to update podcast content snippets of various parts of their output from the latest news bulletin to the latest weather. And since the application let’s you choose favourites into a playlist – I could build a playlist right now of the latest news for KNX 1070 Notable NewsL.A., plus weather for New York (because maybe I’m off to the airport to fly there)from the Weather Channel, followed by The Hollywood Minute – and finally BBC Radio 1’s Entertainment News from the UK.

So my “personalised” radio journey still continues. Maybe the BBC can start adding hourly news updates, Traffic Radio can add the latest  travel bulletin by county  and maybe Global Radio can get me a daily dose of the best bitching from Steve Allen (as let’s face it – he is the master of that genre).

If someone could give me the content snippets to pick and choose from – then I’ll be closer to getting exactly what I want.

Or am I maybe being too demanding?

It’s not TV. But I like it.

| jamesstodd

moylesgrab2

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)…

ipod2-1228758140-article-1Whilst 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? 🙂

I want it all. I want it now.

| jamesstodd

 

aol-radio-iphoneImage http://www.geardiary.com

“I want it all. I want it all. I want it all. And I want it now”. And so sang Freddie Mercury back in 1989.

Back then, the thought of an “on demand” world was little more than a pipe dream on “Tomorrow’s World”. But I have seen the future , and it sits in my living room now. I fire up the Virgin Media box and that’s pretty much what I get – down a fibre optic line. Want the Christmas “Doctor Who”? Simply select the BBC iPlayer and it’s there on screen in seconds. Fancy an old episode of “Spaced”? Click on 4OD and it’s there just as quick. And maybe anything from a massive catalogue of stuff from Warner Brothers TV in the US – just as easily.

So has this really changed my viewing world, when just a few short months ago, I was singing the praises of the Freeview recorder box that we watched everything on – never in real time? Not really – but now I can get the iplayer or 4OD (and soon ITV content) whenever I want it.

So what about radio? Will I ever consume it in a similar way? Sure – there’s the iPlayer to catch up on whole shows. Or the many shows (both BBC and commercial) that I can download as podcasts. But maybe I don’t want it quite that way. Maybe I want to become the scheduler just like I can be on my TV. Maybe I want my “radio” to be exactly how I want it.

In my future world  I’ll want to be able to do this…log on to “My BBC” and create my whole experience to take away on my iPod – something that updates according to my choices every day. I’ll choose what content I want and choose the music as well from my iTunes library. My music that I own and the BBC content that I’ve paid for. But why just BBC content – why not let me have the best commercial radio can offer as well (served up in a data packet with an advert bolted on)? 

So maybe my morning commmute will have me listening to this 30 minute example on my Ipod – which I will have synced before picking it up to leave the house at 7.30.:

Random ipod track

BBC News from 5 Live

Most recent BBC Travel from BBC London

Random ipod track

Chris Moyles show guest from yesterday

Radio1  session track from the Live lounge 

A guest from Geoff Lloyd’s show on Absolute radio (with an ad bolted on)

Business news from the Today programme

A most played track from my iPod

etc.

Sure – there’s a million and one things to prevent this happening – but when websites can pull together content and generate meta data tags to personalise the visiting experience, I’m sure there are ways and means of exporting this data into an application that works with my portable music device – or even to my DAB radio. Don’t ask me how – I don’t work in R&D – but I bet someone here could make it work.

But how would you promote your content when people weren’t consuming the media in a traditional way? Well there’s a topic for a long night in the pub…