Working together
Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 11:03pm. #
On February 11th, something rather unusual happened.
A bunch of people who we might call ‘competitors’ – coders and clever people from across the commercial radio industry – came into Broadcasting House and met some of my team.
Under a stern portrait of Lord Reith in the wood-panelled Council Chamber, lots of mostly scruffy people wearing t-shirts talked about tagging and new ways of visualising audio. We discussed Musicbrainz IDs and other interesting things. Well, interesting to us. And the plan was to work together. Which we did, nicking off to the pub at 4.00pm to continue working together. (The beers weren’t on the licence-fee.)
The phrase you’re looking for (which I nicked off Nick Piggott) is “agree on technology, compete on content”. Sharing technological understanding is one of the things I believe that public service broadcasting should be doing – just as we worked with the rest of the industry to invent DAB Digital Radio, so we should work with the rest of the industry around how we describe music tracks, programmes, and other broadcast ephemera – for all of our benefit. Wouldn’t it enrich the UK broadcasting landscape if we could all describe things in the same way to enable a third party, or even one of us, to say “You liked this programme on BBC 6 music – so you ought to like this programme on XFM“?
It’s hopefully going to be one of the founding thoughts behind the Radio Academy’s “Radio at the Edge” conference in November this year – a conference where this time around I’d like to not just talk about stuff together but make it, too.
If you’ve any ideas what else we should be doing at Radio at the Edge this year – or even who should be on the committee to help – then I’d be interested in your comments (both private and public).
Photo: Tim Williams. Used under licence.
