Multimedia Meets Radio – day 1
Posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 4:10pm. #
The first day of a two-day conference in Prague, run by the EBU – the European Broadcasting Union. Yes, they’re the people behind the Eurovision Song Contest, and a classical music overnight sustaining service, but under Mike Mullane they also do a good amount of sharing of knowledge – and this, Multimedia Meets Radio, is a shining example.
As is customary for a radio conference – the sound had problems, microphones were never quite in front of the right people to speak to, etc etc. It’s the law, dodgy sound at radio conferences, and I’m delighted that the EBU didn’t let us down.
But some of the sessions have been really interesting. Jonas Woost from last.fm and Steve Purdham from We7 did the standard schtick about digital music business models, which we’ve heard a lot of in the UK, but I’m guessing came as news to many people here in the Czech Republic.
Then, a fascinating few sessions around “introducing your new favourite artists”. The BBC has “BBC Introducing” (not mentioned in today’s session), but the BBC isn’t the only public service broadcaster introducing their audience to new music. Dominik Born, Project Manager for mx3.ch spoke about their service. It lets new bands upload their songs, but also allows people to grab widgets (and a nice iPhone app) to listen to it – based on music genre (so I could add all new trad-jazz bands to my website for example). What was interesting is that mx3.ch is a separately branded service for many of the public service broadcasters in Switzerland (who don’t share any common brand, or, indeed, language). Nicely done.
And then we heard from Steve Pratt from Canada’s CBC Radio 3 (strapline: “Breaking New Sound”). CBC Radio 3 is the “worst radio station in the world”, he said – it’s programmed entirely against the rules. Music you’ve never heard before, chosen by the audience, and very few big hits – yet it works fantastically well, merged together with a set of podcasts and a great-looking website. CBC Radio 3 allows bands to upload their favourite songs, but then to give them a player for their own websites… a neat idea, giving bands a good incentive to take part (and covering their bandwidth costs). The radio station plays music which isn’t owned by a record company, so the programmes are also fully available as a nicely chapterised podcast, too. Users can register and be given recommendations, be able to program their own playlists (some of whom get on-air from what I could tell), and they get their own page on the website too. This is really clever, really far-reaching stuff, and I was hugely impressed at seeing it.
Two more neat things in the final session of the day (“delivering innovative services”). First Henrik Heide, Editor of Danish Radio, showed off their new personalised radio player which goes live in a few weeks. DR offers a bunch of music stations (about 15 from memory), and the idea is that you listen to those non-stop music stations… until one of your favourite programmes is on the air, in which case the non-stop music station gracefully fades out, and it’s replaced with the live radio programme. Once your favourite programme has finished, it fades your music stream back up again. Really nicely done, and looking suspiciously like the BBC’s new ‘global visual language’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
And then it was the turn of Gerhard Zienczyk, Head of International Relations for the German radio broadcaster WDR. They have a problem – they don’t have all the music rights that they need to offer every radio programme on-demand. And they certainly can’t supply their programmes for download onto your iPhone. So… they’ve a novel way round it – they get you to record the programmes yourself. The WDR Radio Recorder is a free download from their site, which records WDR radio services (based on the download of an EPG). This records the 128k MP3 stream; imports the resulting full programme into your iTunes, and lets you get the entire thing in a DRM-free file which you can then listen to on your iPhone out and about. A clever (and visually beautiful) way around a legal licensing issue. Neatly done.
If you’re interested, @mmradio is on Twitter, and there’s a live blog to read as well.
