Radio at the Edge - live blog
Monday, November 10th, 2008
10.10am: A windy morning here in Millbank, and already one of the doors into the conference theatre is broken. But it’s nicely full, my opening speech went well. And now Clive Dickens is on-stage. Come back later and I might have more information.
10.15am: Steve Bowbrick is live Twittering at #rate
10.20am: Clive Dickens, COO of Absolute Radio: “Behave like the brand you wish to be”, he said, talking about the change of brand (from Virgin Radio to Absolute Radio) as a ‘crossfade’. Discussed their onegoldensquare.com website; which was apparently there to communicate to the staff (where they had 6 weeks between agreeing the sale and being able to ‘pick up the keys’).
Said that there were loads of places to change the ‘Virgin’ brand into ‘Absolute’ - 340 different touchpoints, apparently, things like DAB, FM RDS, telephone systems, etc. And there were 55,000 images on the Virgin Radio website that potentially had a Virgin Radio logo in them, and all the code needed changing too. Discussed how they used the audience to spot these. It took three days for the audience to do this!
A listener came in and interviewed Clive Dickens. But Absolute also made mistakes. They changed the FM RDS a week early. So Christian O’Connell made a bit of a joke about it on-air. Mistakes can help, said Clive.
Absolute is now on 32 different platforms, he says. The first words spoken on the radio station… was an Absolute VIP’s, describing what Real Music is, which they posted on their own Absolute Radio blog. Their playlist email is quite unique: where they compare their own playlists with other radio stations. They pinch this information from last.fm scrobble feeds, or other radio players. Nicely done. So they can “be honest” and show the amount of records that the radio station plays, in comparison with Radio 1 and 2, Capital, XFM, Heart, and Magic. He also tells of a mistake when they played a piece of audio twice in a no-repeat workday, when the station was inundated with complaints. (It was a montage of Obama, not really a record).
Says that podcasts are a waste of space on the Absolute Radio homepage, since people actually go and use iTunes to find new podcasts; so it’s important to find space there too. And they’ve also got a YouTube channel, blah blah blah, They promoted their station on YouTube too - buying 5 million impressions, 250,000 clickthroughs on a Saturday. (Interesting that it was a Saturday). Says you have to go where the audience is, not on their own website.
It’s bloody hot in this theatre.
He shows a nice graph from Google Trends, showing that more people are doing organic search for “Absolute Radio” than “Virgin Radio”. 50% of all Absolute traffic is from search engines. Says this is important for all of the radio industry - how quickly new brands can take shape, particularly with the power of radio behind it. Says rather bizarrely that the BBC was a big help, since they were the fourth-read story in the world on bbcnews.com for a while.
Finally, talks about how they handle email bounces. Doesn’t know how long it’ll take for this to work through.
Enjoying @bowbrick’s updates.
10.50am: “Dead and Buried” session with James Ashton from the Sunday Times, about DAB.
Disclaimer: these are just scribbles, and I may have badly written things people said down
Tony Moretta (DRDB)
Says the recent problems are down to commercial radio sustaining the platform; but that commercial radio is hardly alone in having economic issues. If DAB was dead, surely consumers would be not interested. Trots out a ton of positive statistics about DAB - including almost 1-in-3 households have one. “Those well-known niche manufacturers Ford, Vauxhall, BMW, Audi” - all offer DAB as standard in some models. Combats some urban myths, including audio quality and car receivers. Says DAB+ is a complete red herring - isn’t a problem with capacity at the moment, not a problem with audio quality for vast majority. Finally, internet radio is not mass-market for some time to come; it won’t replace DAB for a long time to come. How can you use the iPlayer when driving around, on the bus, etc. We are not the typical radio listener. Don’t listen to the Twitters and the Facebook addicts - listen to the real people; and ideally, make them wifi-enabled too, to enable extra interactivity. Above all: “as an industry, we shouldn’t be so bloody negative about it”.
- “Who’s going to pay for this?” He thinks manufacturers are quite happy funding newer services.
Paul Fairburn (Smooth Radio)
The GMG view of DAB is a moderate one. Not enthusiasts, but see it as part of the future. It is expensive - too expensive - and hard to work out how to afford these new services. No wish to launch new non-analogue brands. You may well see us withdraw from some platforms where it is not economically viable. What happens if we switch off, say, Freeview - most people might be able to switch devices (though they’d lose trial). 8.5% of Smooth listening comes from DAB. And we’d be stupid to switch off DAB. We don’t propose to add to our costs by adding expensive ‘bits’. Says he’s come off a platform but “hasn’t had a reply to the email yet” so won’t tell us.
Mark Friend (BBC)
JamesA asks “Is this your opportunity to crush commercial radio?” - no (and he’s better things to be worrying about).
Do he want radio to go digital or not? Yes. He could see a drop in total radio listening by 25% by the end of the decade, if you extrapolate recent figures. The BBC does not degrade its internet streams to make DAB sound more attractive. “That is complete and utter nonsense,” he says.
People want things that are cheap, good quality, just work wherever they are, have a wide choice of content and devices. Both DAB and the internet matter. Is DAB an important part of the mix? Yes. Compares DAB listening to internet listening. Cares about “universality” so sees a mix of delivery platforms as crucial.
JamesA asks about “the Freeview moment”. But it isn’t. It’s not the best technology, but it works really well, and consumers like it. He works with commercial radio, manufacturers, and more, to make DAB a success. “The Freeview Moment” kind of bugs me slightly, he says.
Peter Davies (Ofcom)
Peter emphasises that DAB is a success. There is no consumer crisis. The parallels with Freeview - at the time of the crisis, there were only 600,000 Freeview sets in the market. DTT still covers far less of the population. DAB is far further down the track. Talks about Germany, France, Australia all doing the technologies. Talks about DAB+, DMB, etc, and talks about the standard EU profile which means that all of those competing standards won’t matter - a radio set will receive them all. And the Digital Radio Working Group is important. But there are problems with cost, with the economy, and “problems with the structure of it”. That’s why Ofcom called the industry together back in February.
Defends D2 multiplex. Says it was driven by the market, not driven by Ofcom. How does commercial radio hand back digital radio licences? Is it simple? No, it’s tricky - if they withdraw from DAB then there’s a very strong risk that they would lose their licence, and Ofcom would have to think about readvertising it. But the way that the legislation is set up means there’s no option. And it would be unfair for those stations who didn’t make the leap to DAB. We all want to find a way to restructure the industry in everyone’s interest - the shape of local and regional muxes. We have overcapacity at a local level, which diguises undercapacity at a national level (not sure of this point). Says part of D1’s problem is that it’s a single-frequency network.
Darryl Pomicter (Ressen Design)
Internet Radio complements, not replaces, broadcast standards. DAB’s failed in many places, and there’s no global standard. There’s little listener-need for new receivers with only local live reception. Don’t believe your own PR. RAJAR results are being misunderstood - DAB is not five times more popular than the internet. Reported results are for subscriber stations. They don’t include listening to ex-UK stations, smaller non-members, or internet-only. Don’t cling to unsuccessful superceded technology. New formats are rarely successful. Video8, Beta, SuperBeta, etc. iPlayer is 8-to-1 streaming, not downloads. (This is disputed by the floor).
Daniel from Juice: RAJAR is notoriously unreliable. But in the words of Fru Hazlitt, DAB “is fucked”, largely because of the costs of carriage. The UK’s rollout of DAB has been a disaster. Many would pull out tomorrow if it wasn’t because of two things - first, the licencing, second, the multiplex owners.
Peter Davies: “Nobody had to invest, they felt it was a good idea”.
Nick Piggott: Cost of digital radio. Wonders what the comparisons are between DAB and other digital platforms.
MarkF: Hasn’t done the costings for wimax.
Peter Davies: Cost of DAB nationally is cheaper than FM nationally. But for local it’s different.
Paul Fairburn: Way more expensive to hit all your audience online than it is with DAB.
Darryl P: There’s nothing wrong with FM. View internet as a complement, not as a replacement, and all this goes away.
Tony M: Don’t set your hopes on wimax being the future - it will need the same infrastructure as mobile phone networks. I can’t see a huge amount of companies planning this.
Matt from Folder: An FM licence is great if you have an FM licence. For Fun Radio in London, out of all the platforms, the thing which generates the money is the hours, and where the hours come from is digital radio. Large groups don’t have the desire to invest more.
PaulF: We’re not looking to head off in new and exciting directions right now; we need to be cautious about it.
Darren from Juice: Peak weekday audiences to BBC 6music - peak halfhourly is around 50,000. Typically these are getting audiences of 10-15,000. If you look at Planet Rock, niche like that, you’re much better off looking at IP. They’re not broadcast platforms the way we’ve thought about broadcast platforms. 5Live Sports Extra has very fewlisteners
MarkF: But if we didn’t do 5LiveSE on DAB, even fewer people would listen to it - it would have a fraction of the appeal that it currently does. We can see it scaling on a DAB platform.
@fatcontroller, @matt and more now tweetin with @bowbrick - the code’s #rate.
11:38am: Coffee, sponsored by All-In-Media. With a prize draw.
11:57am: Kelly Shepherd: BBC World Service
13 million unique users per week for their website. Over 180 million radio listeners around the world. That’s, kind of, quite large. Ran a community last year to help the website redesign. Set up this community to comment on wireframes and different stages. Sounds like design by committee on a grand scale! But very helpful apparently. Shows lots of feedback - both good and bad. Again, talks about podcast selection being done mostly in iTunes. Shows mobile - a mobile screen in Arabic looks really odd. It’s a Java app, apparently.
Embedded video players on the web apparently add massive increases in video traffic (instead of nasty Real buttons). Likes using video on their site to ‘personalise radio’ - tiny bits of video of all of the presenters speaking. What a good idea. Presenter biogs are always the best trafficked pages on any website; why not spice those up with video, too - and watch the voice speaking. That was always the coolest thing about going to work for a new radio station - seeing people talk with those voices that you hear on the air.
Talks about the Bangladesh Boat journey - the bit that won them a Sony Gold. Talk about user-generated-content (hello @derivadow). WorldService also have these nice things like virtual keyboards, enabling you to use a keyboard for your natural language, even if you’re in a web cafe far from home. Nice idea!
Spotting Jem Stone blogging next to me.
12:15pm: Getting intimate with the audience
Fi Glover chairs. Actually asked “What kind of hot-diggity piece of technology have you seen recently”. Hot-diggity!
Iain Lee is a tall fellow. He does his own podcasts, videos, etc. He’s on Facebook, MySpace, blah. Thrives on instant feedback. This type of thing normally attracts fans, he says, but doesn’t mind people coming on and leaving rather less positive feedback either. It’s all pointless if it’s all positive, he says. If he charged for Shindiggery, he says, he’d slip from 3,000 people down to about 10, who’d then share it anyway. Has learnt his lesson about keeping things within the law. “Most people want to listen to a radio show. Hardly anyone wants to text in, phone in, etc.” Has just discovered listen-again using an internet radio - says it’s fantastic.
Daniel Heaf is looking really suave and sophisticated, ladies. He encourages others to curate content, leave a trail of digital content. Wonders where the Russell Brand audience will go (a podcast, a blog, etc). Asks why people blog under the BBC website, so what happens when they leave the BBC. All radio stations need to be more open. Radio should be assimilating off-station online content from talent, rather than eliminating it. But says BBC is progressive in letting their staff blog and use the internet. Uses Twitter as a “low-level radar” of things that I might be interested in.
Rory Cellan-Jones, taking photographs of other panellists during this session and tweeting throughout. Is Twittering a good use of his time? Probably not, he says, but it ties him in to a small community of those who are really interested in technology. When working on stories, starts from the standpoint that stories on Facebook/Twitter/etc probably aren’t true. Wonders about the personal/professional split about BBC people who are active online (hello!). Should we be able to say who we politically support on Facebook for example. Uses these tools to find simple case studies (”a man in Grimsby who hates his bank manager”); but wonders whether, just because some punter has sent an image in of a news event, should we use it?
Our constant use of #rate in Twitter has now triggered a couple of “trending” bots, who are pointing other people towards the #rate feed.
Lunch
Back soon
2.10pm: Adam Bowie is also liveblogging this conference.
Death By A Thousand Cuts - talking about music personalisation. I’m not live-blogging this much yet, because I’m grappling with the Big Laptop which will be doing the Skype with Leo Laporte later, and my little nice Acer has mysteriously lost wifi. I’m rebooting it.
[later]
Right. I can control the Big Laptop from the Little Laptop, and I’ve missed a much of this. It’s been interesting, though - Chris Kimber talking lucidly about some of the BBC’s stations. Anyway, here’s some of what you missed:
bowbrick: #rate Fi Glover promised us http://tinyurl.com/vol-au-vent (expand). She lied. Now it’s Last.FM, Sony Music, We7.com, BBC on personalisation
bowbrick: #rate Interesting to hear Chris Kimber discussing the BBC’s music output in the same context as commercial and download services
smartin: #rate Chris Kimber says bbc.co.uk risks falling behind the curve.
bowbrick: #rate 57% of Radio 3’s music output is not from a CD. This presents a major challenge when attempting to provide track names via DAB etc.
Talking about trust (in terms of music discovery), Jonas Woost from last.fm says he doesn’t trust any commercial radio station in the UK. He says he trusts the BBC a little bit. Chris Kimber says he doesn’t always believe in “wisdom of the crowds”, given the trusted guides that are on the BBC. Says that people will still be listening to the radio in ten years’ time. Says he’s planning personalisation around recommendations, and segmenting them.
Steve Purdham from we7 is quite an engaging man. Says there’s only two people who are important in this world: the artist and the fan. Good. Federico Bolza from SonyBMG sounds enlightened and clever. He might look like he’s about 18, and in dire need of a haircut, but he’s a good and bright man.
dickdotcom: Big cheers to federico bolza from sony who’s the 1st record exec i’ve heard to talk absolute sense
… “you music industry people have changed”, says Nick Wallis, the chair of this. Chris Kimber says “the music by itself is not enough. A radio station offers more than just the music, but the context, which could be a distinguishing factor.” I do like Chris, he’s a bright man and much more intelligent than I’ll ever be. And he bought me a beer o… actually, I’m not sure he has.
Average downloads on “as many music tracks as you want” mobile services is actually 35, apparently.
Matt Wells from The Guardian tries to be a smart-arse and ask a “difficult” question of Chris Kimber, who deftly deflects it and makes him look like a smart-arse. I think Matt was scared of the phrase ‘personalisation’, and has jumped to the wrong conclusion that the BBC are launching a last.fm-alike. A BBC colleague whispers in my ear to describe Matt as a “kinder version of the Daily Mail”.
3.55pm: Visualising Radio - John Ousby (BBC) and Robin Pembrooke (Global)
John Ousby shows a ton of nice BBC visualisation of radio. Fundementally two different types: “Synchronous Linear Glanceable Content”, the second is “Specials” (like events and seasons, not tied into the linear stuff). As a ’special’, Scott Mills had cameras in every room in his flat. John showed nice clips from this. Average listenership went up five times during that week apparently (for the website?). Discusses YouTube stuff (mainly UGC, but not all). Shows “The 5live football player”, a nifty shareable widget with video and stuff. And shows a live demo of the Radio 1 Big Weekend “band in your hand” thing, which is very cool. And talks about what people want: “the name of the song playing”, an EPG, slideshow, etc - showing some future ideas for IPTV. It’s all very good. But then, I would say that.
Robin Pembrooke promises a world premiere of an iPhone application which they’re launching next week - ooooh - but he’s leaving this till the end, boo. Says that visualisation is already with us - shows Capital/Heart websites, livetext, etc. Talks about premieres and stuff - great material for the breakfast show to be talking up. Quotes some research showing that visuals aid recall by 30%. Says some visualisation is quite high cost. Shows Brand/Ross video - it’s almost impossible to escape! He talks about listening to last.fm on his walk to work (he must be on a packet, walking to work!) and says that the coverage is better than DAB. Hmm. Wireless 3G? Talks about listen-again on a wifi radio (quotes ‘Just a minute’). C’mon, Robin, give us the scoop of the iPhone app. He reminds us not to wait for the perfect platform “Audience = £”. Finally, shows the demo. Yay. Quite nice looking, with visuals (from slideshow), allows tagging, Really nice. Talks us through the video expertly. Meanwhile, I’m slightly concerned that the wifi has just fallen over. Leo next
…
Leo was very good. However, I was panicking enough about the Skype connection (he wasn’t answering, then he did answer and it froze up) that I didn’t blog a thing. Hoping Adam Bowie did.
Now listening to Andrew Collins and Richard Herring doing a rather good podcast. Live. In front of us. Amazingly, most of the audience are still here (unlike last year). This is good. I am beginning to relax. What could possibly go wrong now? This piece is quite light, with Andrew and Richard doing a good humorous podcast explaining how they got involved with podcasts. Quite interesting.
Tomorrow, I’ll write up a proper piece of verbiage about this, including other peoples’ tweets and other things. But there’ll be a drinkie in a minute - hosted by mediauk.com - and then we’ll go down to the nearest pub and find some nice beer. TTFN.
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