James Cridland

The blue screen of death

The Blue Screen Of Death

For companies that use CrowdStrike, it was a difficult day on Friday. Australian broadcasters were worst hit, since the affected software update started being rolled-out at about 3pm in the afternoon our time.

ABC Radio’s playout system went down, as did much of its output - for a while, I gather ABC Radio Brisbane was outputting a service from Melbourne. This piece from RadioInfo says that NOVA were reduced to running a laptop with Spotify, 2GB similarly lost playout, and just had to… talk.

Props also go to ABC News channel on the TV, who were left with live camera feeds and not a lot else: no VT, no on-screen furniture, nothing. We got four hours of creative non-stop filling by the team. Most impressive.

There will be learnings from this, of course (and I hope some broadcasters are as open about these learnings as they were about how clever they were at the election). Some emergency playout system is probably a good idea to consider somehow; or, at least, having a few CD players available somewhere. But it’s been a busy few days for IT teams, many of whom have had to physically reset every single computer that was affected. Good luck to them.

RCS

  • You might remember that a few weeks ago, I shared Wondercraft’s cloned voice of me, doing my daily podcast in Japanese, French and other languages. But, I wondered what else I could do with that technology. I gave it half an hour of France Inter’s breakfast show from July 8, and told it to translate it from French to English. The result is pretty impressive - each different voice has been cloned; and while not everything is perfect, it’s a surprisingly good listen. There might be a product in a global radio receiver app that translates everything into English (or whatever), perhaps?

  • Have you ever seen a radio promo like this one? For BBC Radio 4’s God Next Door - a promo that looks amazing, rather like a TV show, rather than a radio show. (There was, I discover, a sizzle reel shot for TV commissioners, and an interesting process of taking TV audio into radio audio.) I’m surprised that it’s surprising, if you see what I mean; promotion of content on different platforms probably means we’ll see more camera crews on radio shows in future.

  • A good piece from Fred Jacobs, asking “What’s radio’s job in 2024?” He highlights US radio’s reaction to the Trump shooting (something I went into last week.) He discovers that NPR sent an alert at 6.41pm - astonishingly, 30 minutes after the incident; and that the network’s Up First show doesn’t bother with Sundays. (The Daily from the New York Times didn’t bother either, waiting until Monday; but notable that Start Here, the competitor from ABC News in the US, published an extra show on Sunday morning).

  • In the UK, GB News Radio is now using AI-generated voices to read sports news. GB News Radio is a simulcast of the TV channel, with a requirement to fill the TV ad-breaks. It doesn’t sound too bad to me; AI-generated voices are OK for about thirty-seconds, which is all this is.

  • Bauer Media is to rename Scala Radio as Magic Classical; the same station, but under the Magic network. Scala is a relatively new brand for Bauer (launched in March 2019), but in March 2024, many of the presented shows were replaced by non-stop music, leaving only 0600-1300 presented. It’ll help bolster the Magic network’s figures: the station had 1.7mn hours (188,000 listeners). Magic Chilled (1.2mn hours, 432,000 listeners) will move over to the Hits network. (I’m still bewildered at the continued existence of Planet Rock and Absolute Classic Rock, which both appear to do the same thing).

  • Lisa Nandy, the new British Culture Secretary, was interviewed by Leading, the long-form interview show from The Rest is Politics. In the hour, she doesn’t sound too positive about the BBC’s plans for advertising in podcasts inside the UK.

  • Want to supercharge your radio show? Here’s a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep - from a world class radio consultant and the best show-prep writer in the UK. Great for UK stations, or for English-language stations everywhere, too. (ad)

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