Here. Take all our ideas. Free.
Posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 9:31pm. #
Photo: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com, under licence.
I’d have used one from Schulze & Webb, but they claim copyright for theirs. Boo.
Radio is, by its very nature, a solitary medium. We don’t, by and large, sit down with our friends and enjoy a radio programme, smiling at each other when we hear the presenter’s witticisms, frowning together when the interviewee evades a question, shaking our fists at the sheer craptitude of the ad for Ocado.
However, we do enjoy radio in a social context. I like it that it’s not just me that listens to the Five Live Breakfast Show. Terry Wogan’s made a career out of comments from his ‘Togs’. Politicians chatter together about the latest interview on Today. Radio is just as social as television – and, as we watch more timeshifted telly, possibly even more so.
One of my clever team, Duncan Robertson, built a BBC Radio Facebook application which plugs my friends into the BBC Radio Player. I discover that, amongst my circle of friends on Facebook, Radio 2 is just more popular than Radio 4 (which, in turn, is just more popular than Radio 1). This is good, since it appears that Radio 1 is the most popular service overall. This is all a great start; plugging the BBC into the fastest-growing social network service.
But there are days when I quite like to turn on a radio, rather than the PC. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get that same information from a radio, rather than a big expensive PC? If I could see what my friends are tuning into – and, if there’s a great programme on, join them?
This is why I’m really pleased with what Shulze and Webb are doing with their project, which they’ve apparently christened after a historic city in Brazil, which shares its name with the Portuguese phrase for “Oh, beautiful”. Their Olinda social digital radio, which they’re building for the BBC, is tremendously exciting.
Plugging into a project that my colleague Tristan Ferne has been working on, Radio Pop, this really is the radio for the social generation. Chris Bowley also posts about the prototype and his work in Radio Pop.
The thing I’m most pleased about isn’t the hard work that Schulze and Webb are doing; nor of the hard work that Tristan and Chris have been working on: but the fact that all this hard work is available for any manufacturer to use. For free. As Matt from S&W says…
The BBC should be able to take [the radio] to industry partners, and for those partners to see it as free, ready-made R&D for the next product cycle.
So that’s why I’m proud to say that, when complete, the BBC will put the IPR of Olinda under an attribution license–the equivalent of a BSD or Creative Commons Attribution. If a manufacturer or some person wants to make use of the ideas and design of the device, they’re free to do so without even checking with the BBC, so long as they put the BBC attribution and copyright for the IPR that’s been used on the bottom.
This is all great news. Free, ready-made R&D for manufacturers. And some tremendous content for us. It’s a win-win.
Tony Moorey
Exciting stuff, James. If it was possible to integrate this into the radio player with listen-again and some sort of user registration, it could be very powerful. I might easily see myself sampling programmes that like-minded friends had listened to.
Very positive for the BBC, as it might tempt listeners to cross from network to network. Less beneficial to the commercial side of the industry, which is too fragmented to co-operate on this sort of project.