Commercial Radio Australia is roughly comparable to the RadioCentre in the UK – an organisation I know well. So it was interesting to take a walk into the leafy Surry Hills suburb of Sydney to chat to the CEO Joan Warner, as well as Kath Brown and Richard Morris.

Commercial Radio Australia has been the driving force behind the takeup of Digital Radio in Australia. They’ve learnt from the UK well; grasping the opportunity to launch with DAB+, advocating the use of DAB slideshow at launch, organising the industry to avoid the trebling of costs that inevitably come with multiplex owners and transmission companies. And a quick look at the Sydney radio market makes you understand why they need to move digital: the market leader here, 2GB, is on AM. While it’s easy to see a future for FM receivers in mobile phones, AM is less easy to put into these devices. AM’s susceptible to increasing interference: not just from mobile phones but from things like ADSL as well. As I’ve said before, music radio on AM is increasingly not at a quality that listeners will tolerate. And AM transmitters (which are high power, tall, and not very nice to be close to) were originally built away from populated areas; but as cities have grown, these transmitters are now in the suburbs. A replacement for AM – or, at least, an alternative to it – is urgently required.

But the CRA is doing more. It’s responsible for the (diary-based) radio research here, which it contracts to Neilsen. Joan isn’t yet a believer about the effectiveness of PPM, pointing out the issues with breakfast listening that I’ve mentioned in the past. She demolishes arguments I’ve heard from Arbitron; points out that she’s yet to hear an adequate explanation for why the breakfast audience plummets when using PPM technology, and is bullish about the validity of diary-based research. (It is, after all, used in almost every single radio marketplace).

The CRA also offers advice to advertising agencies wishing to buy radio – and even offers a confidential and unbiased service which agencies can use to seek advice on their specific radio planning. The CRA also offers advice on the content of ads and their adherence to the advertising codes, like alcohol (and I’ll bet consumer credit and the likes). Interestingly, too – and unlike the UK – the CRA offers HR advice. It’s also responsible for the music licence negotiations, of which I can’t say an awful lot, given pending court action. (Yes, here too.)

From my point of view, I was most interested in the meetings they set up between all areas of the commercial radio industry. These give an opportunity to network, and to work together – to agree on the method of doing something, while leaving each other free to compete on content. A fine example is the engineering meetings they hold; and here, they’ve done something quite special to safeguard radio’s future.

The advent of DAB – a heavily-compressed audio format – makes it even more important to ensure that output is as ‘clean’ as possible before transmission; so a CRA project called “Piñata” was born, which sets a standard, linear, audio format for commercials. They could have left it there; but they were also mindful of the future. So, when a radio commercial is delivered to a radio station, Piñata defines what it can be accompanied with. It defines the format of scripts and music details (no more faxes!); and – excellently – it also defines a metadata standard for internet links and slideshow images. It also defines a unique ID for the audio – enabling all the benefits that linked data can offer. Images and links alongside audio commercials in your internet radio player are all of a sudden really easy.

This work was spearheaded by the CRA’s digital technical advisory committee and a working group of creative producers, digital courier companies and broadcasters was formed to ensure that these specifications work for all stakeholders. There’s no doubt that this is an excellent piece of future-proofing. As the UK moves into a world where many radio stations will share the Radio iPlayer, and therefore visual advertising is available for the first time in a unified way, would it be asking too much for this to be adopted in the UK as well?

The Australian radio market has more plurality than the UK radio market: no equivalent of Global Radio or the BBC here, in terms of audience share. It’s thus more important for organisations here to work together; and more evident that they do. Almost all commercial radio stations in Australia are members of the CRA (less than 1% aren’t); so the CRA displays a high degree of cohesion to advertisers and those that it lobbies.

I left the CRA feeling that the organisation is in rude health. There’s clearly strength in numbers here. The UK’s radio groups forget that at their peril: a strong and healthy UK RadioCentre is important for a strong and healthy UK radio industry.

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- If all goes well, at this moment I’ll be on a tube train from London City to my house: assuming it’s still standing.
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I rather enjoy using TripAdvisor, and have found it’s unerringly accurate in its reviews for hotels. My trip has been particularly good using it, with some excellent places I’ve found (and I’d particularly recommend the Butterfly on Morrison in Hong Kong).

I write hotel reviews there, too: so far, I’ve written 49. You’ll not be interested in them, so I’ll not link to them. Damn.

I have just written the below review. Just for fun, I’ve copied the text that I’ve just submitted to TripAdvisor below. Clearly, I’m not insinuating that the ITC Grand Central sets out to rip off its guests; there are good reasons for the issues, I’m sure, and a hotel like that would never set out to extract as much money from the Rich Foreigner as it could.

Anyway, here it is – and it’ll be fun to see how much of this that TripAdvisor publish, along with my two-star review. (I’ve added the local beer brand here for clarification). [Later: they posted it in full, by the looks of things. Neat.]

(Other than this, I’ve had a splendid time in Mumbai, thanks for asking. Blog posts soon, though I’ve got Australia yet.)

If you buy a pint of Kingfisher (local) beer in the Dublin “irish bar” (which seems to have the only similarity with ireland in the colour of its seats), you’ll be charged 600Rs plus tax – the equivalent of £9.83. £9.83!!! On checkout, I was told that the taxes on beer are very high here. Is that so? How come the cafe round the corner charges a rather more sensible £1.45, then? I’m sure it’s a special tax for hotels, since I’m sure this hotel doesn’t want to rip me off.

I booked, through a third party website, on a package that specifically says ‘free breakfast included every day”. On checkout, I’m charged for breakfast, and am told that the package I booked did not include breakfast. I’m sure it’s a genuine mistake, since I’m sure this hotel doesn’t want to rip me off.

On arrival, I bought 72 hours of internet access (for £24), with the intention of using it for 72 hours. I vacated the room at 12.00pm on the day of checkout, but intended to return to the hotel later and sit in the bar to work for a couple of hours. My 72 hours of internet access had already been cut off; and it took a visit to the IT team to reinstate the 72 hours that I’d originally paid for. I’m sure that they didn’t mean to cancel my internet access, since I’m sure this hotel doesn’t want to rip me off.

And, in the words of Craig David:
Came to the ITC Grand Central on the Thursday…
Used my credit card here on the Friday…
Got a fraudulent charge on the Saturday…
…and am now without a working Amex card. (Good job I always carry two.) I’m sure it’s only coincidence, and I’ve nothing to prove that the hotel did it; I’m sure this hotel doesn’t want to rip me off.

Now, the room was nice and quiet, much of the attendants pleasant, the laundry service decent and fast, the breakfast excellent (a jar of Marmite!!), the bathroom a little old-fashioned, the TV system had a generous selection of English-language content on a decent LCD screen, the soap so nice I nicked some, the internet is nice and fast and has no spurious censorship, the hotel restaurant is sensibly priced and has decent food, it’s a nice clean building, it’s even within walking access to a train station (albeit fifteen minutes), and it’s nicely easy to catch taxis and other things. It’s not a bad place to be, really.

And the hotel really, really doesn’t want to rip me off. So, that’s okay, then. Because I’d not rate a hotel that wanted to rip me off very highly: certainly no more than two stars. Good job this one doesn’t want to rip me off, then, isn’t it? Good.

(Will this be okay, legal team?)

Earlier this week, I posted an article that mentioned that Hong Kong’s DAB tests are currently coming from iPods.

It seems they weren’t the first to do this… there was an earlier example, in 2005, in Australia. Find out who…

Can anyone beat that? Let me know in the comments…

When I was at Virgin Radio in London, we did some analysis to discover who was the biggest music radio brand on the web. And I discovered that I was working for it. Today, a visit to virginradio.com gives you radio stations worldwide. It’s available in France, Italy, Dubai, Canada – but the longest operating Virgin Radio station, with the exception of the now-closed Virgin Radio in London, is Virgin Radio in Thailand.

I spent seven years of my life working for the Virgin Radio brand. So it was with some delight that I was able to, once more, walk through the doors of Virgin Radio, 23 floors up in a large tower off Rama IV Road in Bangkok. It’s an impressive building: unlike any other station I’ve been in, reception (in dark Virgin red and blue) has one curved glass wall, behind which, moodily lit in red, are all the complicated pieces of equipment that make the radio stations go on air, known in the trade as the ‘racks room’. A fairly dark space with lots of blinking lights is highly impressive to anyone, and making it public has the byproduct of forcing the engineers to keep the place tidy.

Lina Damon, the programme director, showed me round. I walked into the 95.5 Virgin Hitz studio; a large familiar Klotz desk with large familiar logos around it. Next door was their sister station, Eazy 105. And then I go into the boardroom and sit with the internet team, headed up by Getsara Tianchai, discovering later that Wichit Sitthisom had been excitedly tweeting (in Thai) during the meeting. They took down pages of notes from what I told them, which was gratifying, and they told me what works for them on their own websites.

As with Hot 91.5 yesterday, the most popular thing on the Virgin Radio (and Eazy) websites is the place allowing you to listen-live. But here, they do something interesting. First, they’re streaming live video on the web, as well as the audio. Secondly, the live stream is also accompanied with live chat with the DJs.

Live chat is something I once tried to do in London. The theory behind it was to encourage people to keep the radio player open (since we put the chat in there). It was a bit of a mistake, I can probably now admit. At first unmoderated, then moderated by trusted VIP members, it was supposed to be a chat with the presenters about the radio show. As with any poorly run discussion area or chat, it ended up being wildly off-topic, moderators began to be more concerned about their own friends and power rather than facilitating a good discussion, and we quietly closed it (to a few howls of protest) after we realised it was probably too late to save it.

At Eazy 105, however, it works well. The presenters take part while on-air; the producers moderate the discussions and don’t allow any profanity; and there’s a good community feel. It’s live chat, but because it has the full blessing of all the programming team, it’s done right. Indeed, standing in the studio, the morning presenter tells me why they do it – so that people get closer to the radio station and tell their friends.

The Virgin Radio website has one section on it which allows you to listen to selected tracks on-demand (and yes, they pay the royalties to do so). This, along with their charts, has been very popular. It’s expensive to do this, but if you’re a music station, it’s an interesting thing to consider. (Worth noting that charts are popular for Hot 91.5FM as well, and the official chart drives most of the traffic to BBC Radio 1 in the UK).

And here’s something interesting; since the speech is in Thai while the music is English/American, there can sometimes be an understanding gap about what the songs are about. So, every week, Virgin puts up the lyrics for one of the big songs of the moment, translates them into Thai, and even explains some of the phrases being used. Neat idea – indeed, I wonder how many people in the UK know that Britney Spears’ “Hit me baby one more time” is about sending pager messages, rather than violence?

True to form for an open, young, Virgin Radio website team, they even told me what didn’t work. They tried a feature once where listeners could choose their top ten different songs on the website, and a Virgin presenter – or even the listener – would present it on the air each week. Did it work? No. Why didn’t it work? Because it was too much hard work, and because the very point of radio is that you turn it on and it effortlessly entertains you until you turn it off again. We forget that bit at our peril. Indeed, as much of this does, it comes back to user interface, and keeping things simple. Choosing ten great songs? I think I’d find that quite difficult to do as well.

I found my visit very interesting: not just for the industry knowledge I gained, but also to discover that the same ‘can-do’ spirit and ‘colleagues-as-friends’ feeling that oozed out of Golden Square also oozes out of Virgin Radio in Thailand. There are some of the same people involved, but however they do it, I find it incredibly motivating. When it was time to go, I must confess that I didn’t want to leave.

I’m grateful to John Pearson for setting up my meeting, and Lina, Rob and Getsara’s team for their time. And for Lina for laughing politely when I pointed out somewhere in their building where their logo wasn’t to the correct guidelines. Old habits, etc.
On Monday, I move on to Australia: and discover that this industry works closer together than the UK.

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- I’m now in Mumbai, learning about radio around the world; I return on Tuesday Feb 9th. Here’s where I am and when.
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Yesterday, I wrote about Wave 88 in Bangkok; but I was lucky enough to visit three broadcasters in Bangkok during my round-the-world tour.

A-Time Media run a number of stations including Hot 91.5FM. Richie and the fine folks at RCS were able to get me a meeting with Ryo, who works on the website; and, talking a mixture of Thai and English, he told me about the successful websites he runs. The most popular thing on the website is, naturally, the page to listen live to the radio station, he said; but other things that have worked for them have included a live chart based on what the DJs play – there’s considerably freer choice for presenters in Thailand than there is in the UK. This live chart used the now-playing information to show the most popular songs on the radio station: something not unlike comparemyradio.com or the BBC’s music website. It interesting to note that some UK broadcasters try to keep this information secret; yet it’s one of the most popular things here.

Many Thais still have mobile phones which don’t have reliable access to the internet, so A-Time is concentrating on the desktop internet instead; they do all the coding internally (Perl and PHP, if you’re interested), and lack some of the skills to work on the mobile web for now. Indeed, quality of the internet has been an issue in Thailand for a while; it’s only very recently that the internet has been good enough to allow listening to live radio. And, incidentally, the bandwidth out of Thailand can be fairly poor, so broadcasters here are, to an extent, insulated from the full effects of YouTube and overseas broadcasters.

What’s clear from my chat with Ryo is that the main usage of radio websites is the same in many places in the world: to tune in to the radio station. It means you need to ensure that the ‘listen now’ button is as clear as possible, and that your internet streaming works; it also means, though, that average number of pages per visit is very low for many radio stations. The challenge is to produce enough content to ensure that visitors to your website don’t just visit to listen, but also use the rest of the site as well. Part of this is ensuring your web player is as fully featured as possible; part of it is ensuring that your content is as good and relevant as it can be. And, as A-Time have shown, sometimes it can be as easy as displaying a set of already-available information, in the form of a chart, to listeners.

I’m grateful to Colin Fawell, Richie and RCS for their help in arranging this meeting. Tomorrow, I round off my visit to Bangkok, with details of the third broadcaster I saw, and what works for them. It might be a little familiar.

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- I’m now in Sydney, learning about radio around the world; next, Mumbai. Here’s where I am and when.
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I’ve just been shown the studios of Wave 88, an English-language radio station in Bangkok, Thailand. The main on-air studio is small and comfortable; an RCS playout system effortlessly finishes playing one track, plays a jingle, and goes into the next song as I’m shown around. The studio looks outside; and it’s all pretty self-contained; a rack-on-wheels underneath the main desk connects the studio to the transmitters. A whiteboard (de rigeur in every radio studio I’ve been in) has something scrawled in red on it about the headphone jack. A piece of paper shows Wave 88’s SMS shortcode (still six digits, mind you), Wave’s website address, and Wave’s Facebook page. The computer has The Sun’s website on it. It’s all eerily familiar.

Thailand is an odd place to broadcast radio. Licence periods are uncertain, and can last for as little as a year; which would explain why the studio itself is remarkably portable-looking. The FM band is ever so slightly crowded – all large stations are on 88, 88.5, 89, etc, while smaller stations are put inbetween them at the unusual freqencies of 88.25, 88.75, etc. And every single slot is taken. (And we Europeans think the Italians are mad at planning frequencies.)

The transmitters themselves are all run by various parts of the government, and broadcasters pay a monthly fee (around five thousand pounds) to broadcast on them. And, as I sit in the plushly-appointed reception area listening to a little more of Wave 88, I hear the presenter, Paul Jackson, announce that it’s five o’clock and time for the news from Radio Thailand. We hear the pips. Then a rather long pause.

Part of the licence conditions for private radio stations like Wave 88 are that they have to broadcast programming provided by who owns them, in this example, in the form of Radio Thailand. This takes the form of a one hour news programme between 7.00am to 8.00am; news bulletins at the top of the hour including a half-hour lunchtime news programme; and the national anthem at certain times of the day.

The Radio Thailand newsreader, after what seems like an eternity of silence, starts reading the news in heavily accented English. It’s slow and ponderous; a complete contrast to Wave 88’s slick sound only minutes previously. Occasionally we hear an ident for ‘Newsflash!’, which is ostensibly the name of this news broadcast (despite the fact that it isn’t, in any stretch of the imagination, a news flash). The music used for the ident was from one of those Power Shots CDs we all used to use in the late 1980s. Then, the English-speaking listeners to Wave 88 get treated, via Radio Thailand, to a shouty commercial in the Thai language. The newsreader comes back on, does a bit more in a language we can understand, and then, with a sense of relief, we’re back to Wave 88’s mix of Heart-like music, back to Paul’s warm presentation style, and back to 2010.

It must be very difficult to operate a commercial radio station when your breakfast peak is full of that kind of programming, even forgetting this stuff every hour. The only mitigation I can see is if your listener tries switching to another station, they’ll find Radio Thailand there, too, so they’ll soon learn to stop switching. It does, however, worry me that radio in this country is being forced to sound bad: Radio Thailand has no particular requirement to safeguard the medium for the future, and adding these massive switch-off points during the day can only help the sales of iPods (or the Asian knock-offs which are rather more freely available in any street market here). This requirement doesn’t happen on the television, either; none of the channels I’ve seen have to break off for some poorly-produced programming every hour or so. Censorship of TV channels is one thing; but radio fares much worse here – and is disadvantaged in a way it’s difficult to comprehend.

Later, at 5.30pm in the car, I hear another news bulletin on Wave 88. This time, it’s from the BBC: it’s short, snappy, and fronted by one of the BBC World Service’s rather splendid new jingles, dual-crediting the BBC and Wave 88. The BBC World Service is wholly funded by the UK government, and they can still make a news bulletin which doesn’t sound too out of place, surprisingly, on a pop station like Wave 88. Perhaps Radio Thailand needs a little of the BBC’s know-how: for the sake of the future of the medium here.

I’m grateful to Richard Buckle for his time and for getting me into the studio, and for Paul Jackson’s time in showing us round. Nobody I met commented on Radio Thailand’s output during my visit; the above is just my view after listening.

I’ve been travelling with a little iRiver portable FM/DAB receiver, the long-discontinued B10. Americans and Canadians saw it as fantastic new technology – a radio with a screen! – while those in Asia and Australia know better. Turning it on in Hong Kong revealed a set of seven DAB Digital Radio services being broadcast: with names like “DBC3 Oldies”. I listened a bit, and heard a few decent songs. A few emails and telephone calls later, and I was in Telecom House in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong Island, going to see Simon Heung at DBC (Digital Broadcast Corporation, Wave Media Limited), who’d graciously agreed to see me with virtually no notice whatsoever.

I saw a typical big red sign outside the company’s offices, saying, I assumed, “on air”. This is where they ran their radio stations, after all. I got closer, and noticed that no, it didn’t say “on air”, but was instead a big red warning light for “noxious gas emission” or something similar. I wondered if I’d got the right place. I had.

Simon Heung and his bright team gathered round, keen to understand how DAB was going in the UK. I said that most ordinary people don’t care much about radio, and will only buy a new radio set when theirs breaks or when the thing it’s in gets replaced. So we need to wait for people to replace their cars, their kitchen radios, their hifis. We need to be patient. But all the signs point to a slow and comfortable adoption of DAB as the primary form of radio listening. DBC seemed to have a magic plan to get adoption of DAB to happen faster in Hong Kong. Perhaps if I answered enough questions, I’d find out what it was.

Hong Kong is an interesting place to broadcast. It’s full of hills, islands and highrise buildings, things that make any form of broadcasting, particularly FM, rather difficult to do. To effectively cover Hong Kong, you need seven FM transmitter sites, and since you can’t have more than one FM transmitter on the same frequency in the same area, you therefore need seven frequencies. If you therefore wanted seven radio stations on FM, you’d be wanting 49 frequencies; and you’ve got the Chinese mainland on your doorstep who’d also like a bit of the FM waveband for themselves. There’s clearly not enough choice on the dial for a culturally diverse city as Hong Kong. To add any new stations, therefore, you need to go digital. And this is what DBC was testing.

The company is currently broadcasting seven stations from two transmitter sites, as a test to discover what coverage and signal strength is required to cover the Territory. They’re broadcasting both DAB and DAB+; and once they’ve completed their test, they hope that the Hong Kong media regulator will award them a licence to run one, or more, multiplexes.

For their tests, I asked who was making their radio stations for them – where was the content that I’d heard coming from? Simon laughed. “Over there,” he said, pointing. I looked to the table next to me. Arranged on the table were seven colourful Apple iPods. A sticky note in front of each of them had, in biro, the name of the radio channel, and when they were last refreshed. The DBC Easy Listening channel was playing Susan Boyle. The service was a test, after all, with no speech – so what could be easier than a set of iPods on shuffle? I asked if I could take a photograph – he urged me to. “Please,” he said, “it’ll be lovely to look back on in a few years’ time.” The iPods are refreshed regularly with new music (which is stored in Apple’s lossless format, incidentally). The broadcast sounds just fine to my ears.

I spoke to them about the way, if successful, that they should be selling their airtime on their stations to maximise their revenue; discussed additional ways to increase revenue for the company (from content to features); told them how they could get a larger at-work audience; told them what features to market and what features not to market. (Cough – I’m available for your company too; get in touch).

And then they told me about their clever plan to kickstart their business. Hong Kong is next, of course, to the Chinese mainland, a place which makes incredibly cheap electronics. Simon held up a car radio, and tells me that this is a prototype of a DAB Digital Radio which they plan to give to all of the taxi and minibus drivers in the Territory. He then held up a kitchen radio, and talks about plans to manufacture half a million of these (at less than $20 each) and simply give them away. He was unapologetic about the build quality; these are cheap radios, designed to give people their first taste of DAB. People will upgrade to get more features, a better-sounding or a better-looking radio. But their plans should make most of Hong Kong’s nine million residents be able to sample DAB Digital Radio for themselves; and to give DBC the critical mass it needs to start earning revenue from advertising.

It’s a really clever idea; very applicable for small markets like Hong Kong, and breaking the chicken/egg situation of getting enough listeners to get enough advertising to pay for enough great programming to get enough listeners. And it’s not bad news for manufacturers either – it allows them to concentrate on building quality, feature-rich radio receivers with a decent margin. And, just a bit of speculation, but at that price, the radios might only be DAB compatible, so buying a radio that also supports DAB+ would give you more free radio stations, as well as more features like colour images and recording facilities.

I was rather excited by their plan.

So excited that I forgot to ask about the noxious gas sign.

I’m gratetul to Simon Heung, and his colleagues Kelvin Lai and Sam Hui Kin Sang for their time, and it was an honour to also meet Albert Cheng, the Chairman of the company. Tomorrow: this blog is off to Bangkok, for details about the way the government is ruining radio for everyone. No, really.

- If you don’t want to miss any postings in this series, you can subscribe to this blog in Google Reader or via email.
- I’m now in Sydney, learning about radio around the world; next, Mumbai. Here’s where I am and when.
- Want me to present everything I’ve learnt to your teams in Europe when I’m back? Here’s how to get in touch.