Radio leaves the BBC iPlayer, and more
Posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 2:29 pm. #
In a long blog entry with a few slides with the swirls and blobs beloved of management, Erik Huggers announces a slew of cuts and changes to the BBC website: including…
“Radio and music will come out of BBC iPlayer, and we’ll develop a new stand-alone product.”
On the face of it, this looks scary. A large amount of tweets appeared after this announcement, unnecessarily worried – and it even made Erik Huggers come out of Twitter retirement and post his first tweet for three months: “Audiences will still discover both live and ondemand audio in iPlayer. We will however build a new dedicated product for Radio and Music” (which looks a little confusing to me – is it coming out, or staying in?).
BBC radio is mostly consumed live online (74% is live, rather than the 13% of TV viewing). [p15] Radio does three times as much in terms of total hours as a result (weekly average: 170 minutes a week for radio, 77 minutes for TV). [p12] And if you look at users, it was interesting to see that there are comparatively few users of the BBC iPlayer enjoying both radio and television – 73% only use TV, 21% only use radio, 3% use both. [p9].
Radio and TV are clearly different, as you can see from the figures. The hoped-for “halo effect” turning TV viewers into radio listeners simply isn’t happening. So, it does make sense to pull radio out of the BBC iPlayer.
But, radio will continue to have “listen-again”: just not in the BBC iPlayer. Once would hope their “new product” is the UK Radio Player, of which the BBC has a 50% stake.
PS: Hooray! – the BBC have rediscovered that Radio is not spelt “Audio”.
“All radio station sites, music events, podcasts and programme pages will be integrated to focus on highly interactive live radio, quick and seamless access to programming, support for new music and personalisation”
This looks, at first, that a “focus on live radio” means less on-demand content (and that’s certainly how I read it). That’s not the case; what this is saying is that they’ll make radio a little more ‘interactive’ (hopefully that doesn’t mean slinging TV cameras in radio studios), and that they’ll focus on “what’s on right now”, given the differences indicated above. That doesn’t seem too silly to me.
“The automation of bespoke digital radio sites 1Xtra, 5 live sports extra, 6 Music and Radio 7″
BBC Radio 7‘s website is entirely automated, and has been for the last few years or so; there’s little or no live programming on the station, and given it simply plays archive content, it is an appropriate website presence for this service.
BBC Radio 5 live Sports Extra is, I contend, merely an opt-out service (much the same as BBC Radio 4 LW). It doesn’t need a purpose-built website; indeed, online right now, you’ll just see a few placeholders.
However, it’s difficult to understand the benefit of automating a full-service station like BBC 6music or BBC 1Xtra. These are proper stations, with proper live presenters and interaction; and their websites need to reflect that. Automating the websites can’t be the right thing to do, can it?
Automating, or paring-back, live radio station websites appears to tell the listener that the radio company has lost all faith in the station; see the embarrassment of some radio sites. It would be regrettable if the BBC’s planned automation of the 1Xtra and 6music websites was seen as communication that digital radio doesn’t merit the same love and care as ‘proper’ radio.
Anything that takes online live BBC radio listening out of an embedded television player is a giant leap in my book. ‘stand-alone product’ makes me very nervous mind you.