I’m at The Radio Festival today and tomorrow (and apologies if you follow me on Twitter since I’ve rather been blasting the system with tweets, using the @radiofest08 feedback loop to engage in conversation with other Twitterers).

Today’s been a good day, after a slow start.

First, the Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG) reported back on their interim report. Except they published the report last week, so today was a rather lukewarm presentation of some of the key findings that you could have read a week or so ago, which was a shame. I do rush to point out that my boss was really very good. Very good indeed.

“The View From Out Here” was a splendidly good and provocative session from The Guardian’s Emily Bell, ably assisted by some talking heads on video. Emily was nicely catty about the BBC, while Jeff Jarvis was the talking head that made sense: arguing for the BBC to release its technology as open source, encouraging the BBC to open up research, and lots more. Very good stuff.

After the inevitable technical foobar and then coffee, “Who pays the digital piper” was a piece from the big cheeses at PPL and MCPS/PRS who explained how music licencing works, which was fairly illuminating, since they went into detail on how people do get paid - 65% of the PPL money goes to “the featured artist” (like Robbie Williams), while 35% goes to the “unfeatured artist” like the session singers and musicians. Good so far. Then, sadly, they were (at best) economical with the truth - one audience member asked them how they police the internet and to give them some examples of court cases, and they said “well, Pandora is one example”. Not only did they fail to explain how they police the internet, but Pandora didn’t go to court, and indeed was priced out of the game in the UK. Some mealy-mouthed excuses later, and vague threats of “wanting to re-examine how the music licencing works for commercial radio”, they left the stage. I think we (the audience) were way too soft on them.

For example, not only are radio stations charged to play music (fairly), so hairdressers are also charged to listen to the radio in their own workplace. So, radio pays to broadcast music, pays for the infrastructure and the delivery mechanism, only so that the music companies can make another buck from workplace licensing. Surely radio should get a rebate? Otherwise, what are we paying for? Grr.

Then we had a good “what’s the future of music radio” piece, where the wholly sensible solution (and the solution regular readers will be familiar with since I witter along about it as much as I can here) was that we should concentrate on more than just non-stop music - some great documentaries from GMG, some good personality radio too, and George from BBC Radio 1 talking about how they hire their DJs for their music knowledge.

Lunch was nice - both hot and cold, and even pudding. Later today we have a session on The Radio Academy, Community Radio, and ‘Radio’ Fighting Talk which looks fun. I’m avoiding the sessions going on now, though - it’s all about compliance and diversity which sounds slightly less than fun but sshhhh, don’t tell anyone, they might go looking for me.

(The above is my personal view; I’m a director and trustee of the Radio Academy who organise the Festival. My disclosure is probably worthwhile looking at occasionally.)

So, I’ve spent a fascinating day at TechCon, which is the technical beginning of The Radio Festival in Glasgow.

Some really great stuff; the highlight of the day for me, excepting Olinda, was the Student Radio Association who did two engaging talks about what they do, and loads of information about BFBS which is a bit of a hidden gem of a broadcaster - I’d no idea how large their operation was.

Anyway, I had to stand at the end and give a “highlights” presentation - really, a “what you missed” if you turned up late.

Given that, it’ll make quite a nice blog posting - so I’ve edited the slightly libellous jokes out, and published it below as a PDF. And I’m currently sitting in the Radio Academy Press Centre with the proper journalists from Radio Today uploading it now.

Download the presentation here (PDF)

Incidentally, this was the first full presentation I’ve done using Google Presentations. It’s surprisingly good.

Photo: Bob Shand. Used under licence.

Our friends at Siemens in Maidenhead, who are part of the team that keep the iPlayer on the internet and who played a part in the improved sound quality for radio. They’re holding the Bafta that the iPlayer won. I held it for a little while too, but I’d much rather hold a Sony Radio Academy Award. Photo by Matthew Thompson. Used under licence.

Come play with the iPlayer beta. It’s bigger telly, a better interface, and… radio. Built in. Properly. No rebadged Radio Player this time, this is the real deal. It went live just before 6.00pm tonight.

I’m currently listening-again to a very nice documentary from BBC Radio 2 (available till 6.30 on Friday here) about The Beatles. In Flash, finally. At a decent bitrate, finally. No Real Player required (good job, it’s a devil to install on this Ubuntu box).

It’s not perfect yet. But my goodness, what a change.

I’ll bet there’s a ton of interested people asking what bitrates and codecs we’re using (I’ve been fending off the personal emails ever since it launched). So, I’ve written a long, long, blog post explaining this - with lots of nice Wikipedia explanatory links and a link to an internet fridge - for the BBC Radio Labs blog. It’s scheduled to go live tomorrow, Friday, at the arbitrary time of 3.22pm (though it might go earlier). Until then, please know that there are at least two further changes to bitrates and codecs this year. This is not the finished audio quality.

The joy is that the iPlayer looks really simple, but behind the scenes it’s a really, really complicated thing. I’m proud to have played my part in it - radically changing the BBC’s online radio offering (for, I hope you’ll agree, the better).

Finally, my friends outside the UK get the improved navigation and everything except the Flash player (it should drop into Real Player for on-demand content). Let me know if it does. Or if it doesn’t.

Now, enough of that. Go and switch on the radio.

The badly-joined view from Alexandra Palace of London, during my trip there this Sunday

Work

BBC iPlayer: new-look 'radio and TV' service to launch [guardian.co.uk]
All our hard work begins to pay off…

Music recommendations
A Mashed project from Nick Humfrey and Patrick Sinclair - here's the shows I'd apparently like. For their music content, presumably - I can't abide Russell Brand. Good to see former colleague Pete Mitchell at number 8.

Customer service, the BBC way
Read the blog post. Read the comments. It's like magic

Other work

Media UK
I'd kind of like to apologise to my former colleagues for the awful, awful gag they've all heard before in the new cartoon gracing this page

AJAX Libraries API [Google Code]
Media UK uses scriptaculous (and prototype), and that's referenced from every page. And now, Google's picking up the download bandwidth tab, and it's faster for my users. Thanks big g.

Radio things

Fresh Thinking! - by Geoff Lloyd [One Golden Square]
"There are armies of brilliant, imaginative people working throughout commercial radio, but they?re frustrated, withering away, crunching numbers and following obsolete dogma." - brilliant.

Digital Radio Working Group sets out vision for digital future [DCMS]
"For DAB to be a realistic replacement for analogue radio, the current reach of DAB networks to 90 per cent of the population must increase, as must the robustness of the signal."

It just didn’t cliq [dodgy reception]
Mystery blogger tells me I "missed the point". Pah. As if I'd *ever* do that. Cough.

My time in Mumbai [One Golden Square]
Chris Goldson, my travelling companion for a trip we did to Mumbai, finally does a writeup of the trip. Only two years late. Rubbish.

OpenPhotoVR
Wow. This is cool - a kind of 3D photo gallery which you ought to take a peek at for yourself. I've linked to the Sydney Opera House which uses my photo, but take a look at the others

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from June 4th to June 25th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Here’s my opening salvo, lovingly recreated out of sparse notes, from tonight’s event…

First, I should welcome you to BBC Broadcasting House. It was built in 1932, and the room we’re in, the Council Chamber, was envisaged by the architects as “enabling, for instance, representative international committees to meet in London under the BBC’s own roof”. Just outside is a statue done of Ariel by Eric Gill (he of Gill Sans fame, the BBC’s appropriated font face). Lord Reith himself insisted that the penis size of the statues was reduced. I’m not sure what that says about anything but I thought that was important to mention.

I’d like to take us out of the world of future media, and into the world of radio for a second.

The BBC believes strongly in the mantra “agree on technology, compete on content”. You can look at any number of things here - from joint funding of RAJAR, the industry audience research body, to our work on DAB Digital Radio - working together with the commercial sector and others to help develop and promote a successful platform. The same can be said for Nicam and teletext. And then, the current nascent project I’m working on with the commercial radio industry, RadioDNS, a way for your radio to know where to find web services that complement the audio content.

The BBC also helps educate to create a marketplace. BBC News clearly helped make the internet be seen as a serious news medium. Other radio stations use the BBC’s “Radio Player” brand as an easy-to-understand moniker for an online live/on-demand audio product. We all use “forward-slash” when pronouncing website addresses, a trend set by the BBC in a doubtless tiresome steering group meeting. We have a tremendous heritage in working with an industry. After all, we were originally formed, in 1922, to standardise and sell radio sets.

So, back to the building. When it was built in 1932, apparently there were two large offices. One belonged to Lord Reith. But that wasn’t the biggest. The biggest office in Broadcasting House apparently belonged to PP Eckersley, the chief engineer.*

So, as we open our doors to you tonight, remember that technology has always been a major - perhaps the major - part of the BBC.

Things that we’ve learnt: 1) the BBC’s terms and conditions need rewriting to be clear that ‘non-commercial use only’ means ‘ask if you want to use this stuff for commercial gain’, not anything else; and 2) that the average web-startup out there finds it impossible to work out who to contact at the BBC with a bright idea. And that inevitably, rights issues are the main topic of conversation. An enjoyable night, though if I have to accompany one more visitor up those flights of stairs…

Photo: flickr user hugovk. Used under licence. * - I remember being told about this office ‘fact’ by someone, but can’t remember who, or whether it was Eckersley. I can’t find anything on t’internet to back this up. This may be bollocks. As might the story about Eric Gill’s penis-shaving order.

Geoff Lloyd posts a wonderful piece on the TIML Golden Square blog (that’s the company that’s taken over Virgin Radio). In it, he says…

It’s very common in commercial radio workplaces to feel like your opinion doesn’t matter. If you offer your opinion on the output, you’re dismissed out of hand and told that you’re not like a “real listener”. … If you pass on anecdotal comments from friends, acquaintances etc, these are also disregarded, once again, because they’re supposedly not representative of the real audience either. … As for real feedback, on the website, or through texts/email/calls to the studio, this is often ignored too. And why? Because those people aren’t “real listeners”.

Not just is this blog a brilliant and revolutionary idea; this piece says a lot of what I’ve always felt. Geoff’s genius clearly extends to writing good pieces on the state of the industry.

It also shouldn’t be forgotten that your friends in future media - whatever station you’re at - can help and assist with many bits of useful listener input.

We know, for example, exactly how many people actively tune out during every single song; or every single feature; by simply reconciling the minute-by-minute online listening figures with what’s going on on-air. Working out the average %age of tuneouts over the last seven days, and ranking them, might show you whether your listeners are getting tired of songs, or whether a particular feature simply goes on too long. And we can add “like it / dump it” links on our radio players, giving instant feedback.

Using other data, we can work out a percentage of who interacts with Moyles at breakfast and not Mills at drive, based on SMS text numbers and telephone logs. We can ask our listeners for their feedback; and get our listeners to assist with new features. Using tools like http://www.last.fm/user/bbcradio1 or http://www.bbc.co.uk/soundindex/ we can watch for new tracks to play - tracks recommended by computer algorithm as well as the pushy record pluggers.

We can monitor calls-to-action to work out the most effective way of promoting a message. In tests I ran a few years ago, a 30″ promo was around a quarter as effective in driving web traffic as an almost identically-worded presenter-voiced announcement. Repeated mentions of a website feature in a thirty-minute period gave 30% more traffic at the first repeat, and about 10% more at the second (even when Jeremy Kyle was promoting the heck out of it, in his former incarnation as ‘Jezza’).

However, historically radio stations ignore what the future media team can tell them. Again, listeners online are seen as not real listeners; in spite of the fact that most radio stations now conduct music research online.

In my time at Virgin Radio, I listened to a colleage’s 10%-time idea, and enabled him to add a big screen to the office. Matt Deegan blogged about it, and I then added a picture of it to my Flickr stream. This contains just a sliver of information that should be really interesting to radio programmers: the latest version, which I saw when recently having a tour of the station, is even better.

So, don’t ignore your future media team. They’re not just the web geeks in the corner - they could be the very future of your radio station’s programming ideas.

Photo: flickr user wannaoreo. Used under licence.

“Better creations are superior to more creations”.

In March last year, I posted a comment on Mark Ramsey’s blog. Mark has consistently said that radio listeners don’t want more choice, and used this to relentlessly bash HD Radio, the US’s kind-of-equivalent to DAB Digital Radio here in the UK. I’ve consistently said that choice was the thing that sold DAB Digital Radio over here, and thus there’s proof that radio listeners want additional choice. In short, I always thought Mark was wrong.

I’m beginning to think that Mark was right. In a way, at least.

I am, as regular readers of this blog know, quite a fan of beer. So it was that, a few weeks ago, while on holiday in the Benelux countries, I popped into Antwerp’s famous Kulminator, a beer mecca for Belgian beer afficionados.

Walking around any ordinary Belgian beer shop, I recognise almost every brand on the shelves. I regularly drive into Northern France to buy beer to take back home. I have an endearing irritating habit of photographing beer. A fully paid-up member of CAMRA, I go to beer festivals where I can, and always buy the guest beer in pubs where I can, assuming that they don’t sell my favourite beer on tap; only the Hat and Stick in London does, as far as I can tell.

So, I walked into the Kulminator with excitement, confidently picking up the beer menu.

I flicked through the beer menu.

And panicked.

You see, that’s a photograph of the beer menu above. It’s 38 pages long, of tightly-typed bottled beers. It proudly states that there are 918 different beers in stock. I knew some of them. I didn’t know others of them. I found this choice bewildering; scary, even.

I did what most people would have done in the situation. I went up to the bar. “Um, hello. I quite like darker beers. What would you recommend?” I enquired of the landlady. She recommended a Golden Carolous. I drank it.

In the television world, the amount of channels broadcast on Sky can be bewildering too. Just looking at that list fills you with dread of ever finding anything. Thankfully, Sky have made this easier, with an electronic programme guide which helpfully splits channels up by genre, then by programme.

In both cases, this is choice made much easier - not just one big list, but clearer navigation to something I want, either from a human (in the Kulminator) or from technology (on Sky).

But because screens aren’t the first thing you think of when it comes to a radio, radios are very poor when it comes to navigation. The 50-odd stations I can pick up on my DAB Digital Radio are sorted in nothing other than alphabetical order. The only thing I know about these stations is the name. Now, I know what most of these brands stand for - but I wonder how many people, unpacking their DAB Digital Radio, have the faintest idea what these stations play?

Life clearly gets worse if you’re skipping through XM Radio’s 170 channels - and don’t even get me started on the user interface of a typical internet radio, where a great demonstration is to try tuning into WBUR (which is helpfully near the top of the ‘W’s, after the bottom of the ‘K’s, and therefore if you’re tuning in alphabetically using one tuning knob it’ll take you a number of minutes to find); and what’s “WBUR” as a descriptor of what I could find there?

For radio listeners, there’s no doubt that choice is good, in my mind. But we need better ways of navigating through this choice: otherwise the choice turns into unmanageable bewilderment. Bewilderment only fixable with a stiff drink. Might I recommend a Golden Carolous?