I spent some of last week in Leipzig: a very snowy change from sunny Australia.

I was taking part in a “Think Tank” about the radio feature in the digital age. Radio features are mostly confined to public service radio, and hence there were lots of suit jackets and worthy thinking in this conference, in the pleasant surroundings of the Leipziger-Medienstiftung.

Excepting some of the disappointingly sniffy comments about new entrants to this scene (delegates being impolite about the new Danish public radio station and breathtakingly rude about The Guardian’s excellent podcasts), the event was a small and interesting one. Very different to the type of event I normally go to.

The real highlight was the folks from Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ – who do an incredibly job punching above their weight in terms of radio documentaries online.

Liam O’Brien and his colleague David Timpson did an excellent sharing job telling us how the RTÉ documentaries website operates. Full sharing of as much statistics as they could possibly share – which was excellent to see, and exactly what public service broadcasters, paid-for by the public, should be doing.

We learnt that their section of the RTÉ website (1.03m page impressions in 2011) performs much better than their Morning Ireland show’s website – (930,000 page impressions in 2011); to put that into context, Morning Ireland is the most popular radio station show in Ireland – and to put the comparatively low figures into context, Ireland is only 20m 6m people and internet connectivity is comparatively low.

We learnt about mobile usage, too: 23% of all activity on their website is from a mobile device. In terms of downloads, 81% are iOS downloads; 19% Android downloads. (iTunes is not, surprisingly, a big draw for them).

On-line compares excellently with on-air. Their documentary programme accounts for 1.1% of all RTÉ Radio 1 listening hours. Online, documentaries account for 14% of all their podcast downloads. On-air the programme’s on over the weekend. But RTÉ publishes their new documentaries on Fridays. That makes it one of their two peaks. The other peak is on Monday. (Not sure why, but my guess is it’s a mix of “I heard the trails over the weekend” and “I want to use the office internet”.) They’re good at pointing out that their inconsistent FM scheduling (they appear to move quite regularly) is mitigated by online).

Their podcast feed is interesting: because it contains one new documentary a day, and therefore most of the documentaries are from the archives. As a result, 75% of their downloads are not the last month’s downloads – but from the archives. Each programme has great accompanying metadata, too – something that’s missing from many broadcaster podcast feeds.

And a salutary tale for all of us who design websites – the most popular function on their website is the internal search; then next is A-Z. This was a surprise to many programme-makers; I thought it’s interesting that the traffic appears to split between people who know what they want to listen to (search) and people who just want to browse (A-Z).

What’s very clear is that RTÉ’s small team is making the most of a large archive and of a real understanding that appointment-to-listen radio, rather than background-noise, is excellent content on whatever platform: and it could be that the internet breathes new life into this medium. Using the excellent PocketCasts Android app, I’ve downloaded a few to listen to when I’ve time. I suggest you do the same.

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