On air now: discoverability for speech
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.