Photo by “Dusk Rude Boy” at Flickr

RAJAR, the organisation that produces the UK’s radio audience figures, did something pretty good this time round: asked people on which platform they listened. We’ve learnt a whole lot about how people listen to the radio as a result.

I discover this evening that Virgin Radio’s figure for digital listening is a new high - “my” last figures, and, as outgoing Digital Media Director (with a partial mandate to get more listeners to more platforms), I feel pleased about that. Can’t quote the figures, because RAJAR rules tell me not to, though I suspect Virgin will probably go public with those figures soon enough. (You’re allowed to mention your own figures - but not other broadcasters; and since this is not an official blog from my employer, I can’t quote any figures). Someone at Virgin quoted them to me, by the way - I have less access to the full figures than you’d think.

What’s also interesting is the breakdown, per platform, of radio stations. Thanks to someone else, I can quote that the most popular radio station in London on the internet is “Any other station”, the RAJAR catch-all that incorporates all non-RAJAR stations: everything from last.fm to Pandora to any number of other internet stations. You should know that ‘listen-again’ stuff isn’t included, so the large amount of listening via the BBC’s Radio Player doesn’t appear on RAJAR; but even so, that’s an interesting figure, pointing to a potential threat by internet radio to the established radio broadcasters. However, internet radio accounts 1.9% of all radio listening in the UK. It’s not that much of a threat - DAB and DTV beats the internet hands-down. As I’ve said; internet radio listening is not as large as you might think.

Probably more concerning is that 21% of people had no bloody idea how they were listening, and this figure, for some stations, increases to over 60%. There’s one station which is DAB-only that gets a 30% “dunno what platform” score; another similar station, which mentions “DAB Digital Radio” every link, gets a similarly concerningly high figure. This is a worry, since the margin of error is unacceptably high for these stations; but a pleasant confirmation of the truth that nobody cares about technology, all they care about is content, which I think I’ve banged on about here often enough.

Finally, from the ‘all platforms’ survey (which we -can- quote from, and which you’ll find on www.mediauk.com in the radio directory), I learn that not only have Virgin Radio’s figures increased, but that Virgin’s digital-only stations have all posted record figures. Given my involvement in the stations over this survey period, I’m delighted about this; I believe that my old team worked hard at ensuring that we promoted these stations hard and to the benefit of the main brand, and I’m delighted that we delivered on that promise. To see the full rosy picture, visit any Virgin station at www.mediauk.com/radio/starting-with/v and hit the audience figures link. Well done, chaps.

–Later–

You should read Matt Deegan’s post on this subject too, for more interesting information.

So, the news is out. From the beginning of next year, BT Movio - the division of BT behind the Virgin Mobile Lobster phone’s “mobile TV with DAB” shown above, will cease broadcasting mobile TV.

The phone was expensive, large and clunky. The television was jerky and of poor quality. The DAB radio inside it was brilliant. The display of the (WorldDMB standard) electronic programme guide it used was revolutionary.

The pre-launch research had showed that their users spent -much- longer using the radio than the television; but Virgin Mobile decided to sell it by focusing on the TV channels - never once mentioning the excellent radio in any headline. Real users of this phone - which they’d bought for the television - ended up using the radio much more than TV too, in spite of a considerably beefed-up TV channel offering. As a phone-with-DAB-radio, it was a huge success.

The phone was also unique in DAB radios, since - apart from offering a fantastically easy-to-use Electronic Programme Guide - it also offered a ‘red button’; allowing broadcasters to offer additional functionality by linking to their own mobile websites. Unfortunately, broadcasters could never promote this functionality on the air or on other screens of the system, but it promised much.

This was the first radio to be able to display a decent electronic programme guide with full colour station logos, and its backchannel via the mobile network enabled interactivity. It could have displayed slideshow with a simple software update, as well as offering you the chance to record automatically straight from the EPG. Additional software which was planned even allowed you to purchase the track you were listening to, delivered over-the-air via DAB.

It was the only DAB radio I’ve seen that genuinely offered something over and above the user experience of FM. This was no wooden box with a slow scrolly screen; this was a device that, for radio, offered far more than you could ever get with analogue. It showed why DAB radio can offer so much and is so versatile.

It truly showed that DAB in mobile phones works. Consumers really want it. It offers so much more than analogue. And it works well in a mobile device. As a good implementation of a DAB radio inside a phone, it was a huge success. Other manufacturers should take note.

So, as a radio, it was a truly revolutionary product. The real shame was that both BT, and Virgin Mobile, believed it was a mobile television product - ignoring everything their research, and customers, and radio broadcasters, were telling them.

An HD Radio.
CC licenced by Charlie @ Flickr

The globally-challenged Mark Ramsey has just posted another predictable attack on HD Radio, the US’s near-equivalent of DAB Digital Radio. It must be a Friday.

But in it is an interesting quote:
Oliver Media principal Denise Oliver says she’s yet to hear a consumer say they need to buy a HD Radio to listen to a specific station.

Now, clearly Mark is of the opinion that if a country doesn’t sell Twinkies it’s not worth writing about, so he’s not bothered to look at radio markets outside of the good old USA. But it’s interesting that there are considerable parallels between this statement from Denise Oliver, and what’s going on in the UK right now.

At its launch (which coincided with the launch of the sub-£100 DAB set) many people bought DAB Digital Radio receivers in the UK to get BBC 7, the BBC’s speech archive station. Similarly, research I saw from the DRDB many years ago showed that other BBC digital-only channels have also resulted in receiver sales. They’ve been promoted highly on BBC television and radio - nary a day goes past without hearing BBC Radio Five Live promoting their sister station Five Live Sports Extra.

But it’s interesting to look at the difference with commercial radio.

The Arrow is quite a decent digital rock radio station, run by Chrysalis Radio. I listen a fair bit to LBC 97.3, a quite decent speech station run by Chrysalis Radio. So, I’d expect to hear decent cross-promotion on the two, right? Er - no. I’ve never heard The Arrow mentioned on LBC.

Perhaps it’s an LBC thing? So, let’s nip over to Capital. They’ve two Capital spinoffs: Capital Disn– one Capital spinoff, Capital Life, which is on the national multiplex, so you’d have thought that it was ripe for cross promotion. But, and albeit I don’t listen to much Capital, I’ve never heard any.

So, lets scoot over to my old stomping ground, Virgin Radio. They run three other stations - Virgin Radio Xtreme (new rock); Virgin Radio Groove (disco/soul/Motown); Virgin Radio Classic Rock (class-oh, you guessed). Now I have heard Virgin Radio Classic Rock mentioned on Virgin Radio - when Tommy Vance passed away. And otherwise… not.

Without a few good exceptions, commercial radio doesn’t cross-promote. It doesn’t point from FM to AM; and certainly doesn’t point from FM to DAB.

There is a good reason for all of this, of course. Probably a few. Ad agencies are still interested in bulk, not niche - so one station with one million listeners is far more interesting to them than five stations with two hundred thousand each. Programme directors, and presenters, are incentivised on their own station’s results, not on the group. Flagship stations are seen as more important to shareholders than group results (witness the devastating effect of Capital’s woes on GCap). A listener to a flagship station is more valuable in terms of money than one on a niche station. Even the press focus on stations, not groups.

Now, from memory the DRDB’s research did show that people have bought DAB receivers for Planet Rock, too. But by and large, I would suggest that the quote Mark uses could well be used here, too, suitably amended. “Beer-loving radio bloke says he’s yet to hear a consumer say they need to buy a DAB Radio to listen to a specific commercial radio station.” - that type of thing.

Changing commercial radio’s unwillingness to cross-promote would be great news for DAB. However, it needs fundemental business change: both within and outside the industry. And I’m guessing exactly the same issues are responsible for HD Radio’s slow takeup in the US, a place where commercial radio, including NPR, is all there is.

Vacancy - brandon pajamas @ flickr, cc licenced

You might be wondering “come on, James, spill the beans, what’s it like working in the BBC then?”

If you’re into DAB Digital Radio, then why not find out for yourself?

Alternatively, if you buy me a bottle of The Famous Taddy Porter that’s an alternative method of finding out. Form an orderly queue, now.

Something quite good happened this morning.

I was listening, as I have done since it started, to Fi Glover’s Saturday Live programme on BBC Radio 4. If you’ve not heard it before, it’s a kind of a magazine news programme with a few different interviews, including some personal-interest Home Truths type stuff, and some more newsy stuff. And a crap poet who’s clearly been told he’s quite clever, who Fi simpers after all the time, and irritates the hell out of me, and makes me want to throw the radio out of the window. (I’m going to get crucified for this programme definition, I’m sure it’s not on-message. Remember, this is a personal blog. And I don’t work for them yet.)

Anyway, in between the bathroom and the kitchen, someone quite interesting came on. Mmm, I wondered to myself, I missed the introduction of this bloke and I’m a little confused about who he is. While making coffee, I absent-mindedly glanced at the (Freeview) radio screen - useful, since it shows the livetext in one chunk, not a pointlessly-slowly-scrolling crawl. And it said something similar to:

On air now: Tony Lagouranis is a former U.S. Army Interrogator who worked at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

I’ve been accustomed to seeing now-playing information on livetext (that bit of text you see on both DAB and Freeview screens) for a long while. Virgin Radio’s tells you what’s playing, as well as a snippet of information about the artist, for example; interspersed with programme information and the odd piece of commercial content.

But I’ve never seen fully contextual livetext in the middle of speech programming before. And I listen to a lot on BBC Radio Five Live and LBC (albeit less on Radio 4).

This is interesting - and quite exciting. It means, I assume, that someone clever at BBC Audio & Music Interactive (I join the team on Monday, albeit working for BBC Future Media & Technology) has worked out a way of splitting programmes into segments. Easier to do for a pre-recorded programme, but Saturday Live is a - guess what - live programme, and therefore not only have they sorted out how to split this into segments, but also they’ve sorted out how production staff might signal when a particular segment has started in a live environment. And, one would think, they’ve a way of aborting this process in the case of breaking news, or a last-minute change.

The addition of this metadata means that I might be able to, in future incarnations of the BBC Radio Player, to jump straight to the interview, rather than aimlessly forwarding through the audio. And the benefits of searchability - discoverability - are huge. Notable that the billing information for the programme mentioned nothing whatsoever about this guest; yet if I was to search for ‘Abu Ghraib’ on the BBC’s website, this interview could pop up. It could even be available from an API, so that websites devoted to Abu Ghraib could seamlessly add this content to their own.

After my speech at London Calling, I was accosted by someone afterwards who vehemently disagreed with my call to add visual information to radio. “That’s just television, man,” he said, “The benefit of radio, like, is that I don’t need to look at the screen, man, y’know?” I gently disagreed with him that it was television, and agreed with him that you don’t need to look at the screen with radio. He couldn’t see any benefit of additional data to enhance the programming.

My experience this morning, as a punter, shows how useful it is when you do have that additional ‘glanceability’. As they used to say on the Radio Times letters pages: “Well done, BBC.” Which hopefully will be on message enough for Monday morning.

(Update: BBC Radio 4 on Freeview looks like this in case you wondered.)

While I was there, I visited the electronics market in Singapore, and a few other electronic stores. Notable was a total absence of DAB Digital Radio sets, despite DAB launching many years ago in Singapore (and despite the fact that it’s the only country with 100% coverage). That’s a concern.

I did buy something, though - something I discover is known as a “ChiPod”: a chinese imitation iPod Nano. This unbranded machine - above - looks a quite passable imitation, and it cost just £27. Inside, it has three games; a video player (playing the mysterious MTV ‘format’); an audio player that plays MP3s and even displays lyrics; an eBook reader (of which there is no documentation at all); a photo viewer; a voice recorder; and last, but not least, an FM radio.

The FM radio is there, of course, because there’s an FM radio on the chip that’s inside the device, and support for it is written into the software. It was, arguably, more work to disable it.

But it does pose the question: Why, in a £149 device like the iPod Nano, is there no FM radio - when this ChiPod managed to include one, and a mains charger too incidentally, for £27?

It’s been a manic week. Five days in Singapore, and then two nights in Paris. And I’ve still a flight to head office in Glasgow, then a weekend in Dublin to come. I’ve made quite a few blog posts, but if I’ve learnt anything from Martin Belam, it’s to stagger their release. So I’ll be doing that. In my cheesy radio voice: “Stay tuned for a post about Marty, and a post about my new ChiPod! Don’t touch that, er, browser!”

Until the channel tunnel cut off my mobile phone signal, I’ve spent the last half-hour catching up on my RSS feeds, courtesy of Google Reader (for mobile). The last post I read was Matt Cutts posting about Google, using human input to tweak search results). Which set me thinking.

While in Singapore, I was doing a lot of work on the joint presentation Nick and I made; and did a lot of Google searches to back up the information we were using. One such search was launch of dab radio which I punched into the Firefox search without a second thought. It returned information of the launch of DAB digital radio, as you’d expect.

But it returned MediaCorp’s launch of DAB in Singapore. Not the UK launch many years before.

And it struck me that this was perhaps one reason why Google was doing so well. I’ve been oblivious to it for a while, but a search on google.com within the UK gives you UK-biased results. And a search on google.com within Singapore gives you Singaporean-biased results.

I’ve been talking for a long while here about relevant advertising being the way forward. Google’s delivering that - but also delivering relevant content too, depending where you are and what you’re doing.

It reminds me that I ought to be doing geo-location stuff on mediauk.com to add correct dialling codes. Better get onto that. When I’m not so tired. And boy, am I tired.