Multimedia Meets Radio – day 2
Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 12:11pm. #
The second day of this presentation (and a half day, to allow people to get home for the weekend).
Adam Bowie kicked us off from the UK’s Absolute Radio, talking us through the rebrand of the station. This was a similar presentation to Clive’s at Radio at the Edge last year, but with additional information about what the station’s done since – particularly, they’re doing V Festival again this year (tickets went on sale at 10.00am today). I also learnt that their management blog, onegoldensquare.com, is the first thing their staff members see whenever they log into their computers – neat idea.
A nice man from Czech Radio was next, talking about the online research he’s done; and RAI discussing some radio drama with a good accompanying website.
Then it was the turn of Brett Spencer from BBC Radio 5 Live. Brett showed off the visualised radio trial we ran earlier in the year; showed a nicely put together video about how the station made their Wimbledon coverage an interactive thing; and finally discussed their football player (you’ll find this at bbc.co.uk/widgets. He announced that this football player will be on the iPhone – sounds like the BBC’s first iPhone app. Yay, woot.
Then, a bit of an odd thing from Arte Radio.com, lots of exciting French drama, sound effects, odd bouncing eggs, and incomprehensible things; and more mobile apps from Sweden’s SR – including, yes, yet another iPhone app. They’re even advertising their podcasts on Spotify, they’ve paid-for an entire tube train to be coloured in their SR branding too, under the idea that (SR podcasts are) “make getting to work faster”. Really nice to see people promoting podcasting, and not simply relying on the radio station and word of mouth. Incidentally, SR’s iPhone app took significant time to get agreed – over six months, I believe.
Incidentally, it would seem this is truly the year of the iPhone app – I’ve seen so many over the last few days, I suspect it’s worth a montage for the Radio Reborn conference.
Finally, Jonathan Marks – another witty and clever presentation. Brilliantly, started his first slide with “Slide 1 of 2,879″ on the bottom-right. Believes that there’s a great future for community radio in many areas of the world, but does say, starkly, that radio will die out in Asia. “From shouting to sharing” is his nicely observed theme of how technology is changing things.
Jonathan discussed many of the radio stations that he works for in Africa. Really interesting in terms of funding, and how mobile phone SIM cards are used as currency; indeed, mobile needs to be integrated much closer into radio broadcasters’ work. He uses RFID tags to automatically record university lectures for a local radio station (“this is the card that turns the lights on”); and has a novel idea for metadata – “you must say what this lecture is about in the first three sentences otherwise you won’t get paid”: excellent social behaviour! Isn’t impressed at DRM – “DRM = Doesn’t Really Matter”. Says that kids don’t like websites of broadcasters – “most broadcasters websites look finished”. They’d much rather be involved more. Slightly unfortunately squashed into rather a too short timeslot after earlier overruns – but professionally self-edited his presentation to enable us to finish on time. I’ve said it before; Jonathan does a great presentation.
It’s been a good couple of days – some very useful new contacts, some inspiring discussions, and some neat ideas for Radio at the Edge later this year (November 9th, mark your diaries now). Particularly interesting was additional monitors showing the @mmradio Twitter account – someone in the audience writing up interesting quotes from the speakers (though no attempt at conversation with the twitterverse). Now for a quick couple of flights home (cheaper, if longer, to go via Switzerland).
