Radio 3.0 part 1
Posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:59am. #
At Radio 3.0, Broadcast’s rather good conference.
Jenny Abramsky was first up. She spoke very eloquently about a lot of interesting things: doubtless the full speech will appear on the BBC’s website shortly, but some of the interesting thigs were:
- The Archers: their initial broadcast was up, but their repeats were down. But that hid tremendous growth of on-demand for the programme.
- “We have to keep experimenting [with technology] so that radio remains essential in the lives of our listener”
- Mentioned content and quality all over the place. Points out that technology is pointless without content.
- Points out that there are no radios iin most MP3 players; and that 70% of young people listen to their MP3 players every day. Warns about not being complacent about younger audiences. Announces the first DAB/FM plugin for an iPod (due, though she didn’t announce it, in October).
- Talks about visualising radio, and describes the BBC’s experiments so far.
- Finally points out that live listening is not dead: 15m live listening hours last month for the BBC online (pretty damn good!) compares to 474m live listening hours across all platforms. A forceful argument!
Andrew Harrison from the RadioCentre spoke next.
- commercial radio’s localness means it lacks scale and cannot compete for talent and rights
- radio has been the best performing media in recent times (for audiences), compared to other major media
- argues current commercial model is “completely anachronistic” and says commercial radio urgently needs a new business model
- happily we have one, he says. I’m not sure what it is, other than additional ads on radio players and websites, since he then goes and talks about radio’s advantages (ubiquitous, accompaniment media)
- shows crap local radio logos on a football pitch, versus a team including Google, ITV, BBC etc. Says commercial radio is only a £600m sector. Does a fine job of talking industry down for a bit, then perks up again and says we have some great brands to help people navigate into great content (shows Virgin, Heart, Kiss, Xfm, Classic FM logos).
Interesting and good day so far.
William T said at May 17th, 2007 at 7:10pm 
