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Following Up This Week's Media Talk Podcast

2013-05-24T18:54:12Z

An otherwise random photo to illustrate this blog

I quite enjoyed this week's Guardian Media Talk podcast, but there were a couple of things that needed highlighting or explaining a little more.

The BBC has renewed its complaints with Sky about the £5m a year it pays to get on the Sky platform. There was a decent discussion about the whys and wherefores, but I think it was a little misleading in places.

It needs to be made clear that the £5m the BBC is pays is not actually for satellite carriage. That is indeed an open market consideration with a vendors leasing space on satellite and uplink facilities to it. The £5m is in fact for access to the Sky EPG.

Sky publishes the various different fees it charges channels, including some specific fees that channels including the BBC channels must pay on its website. It would argue that these are for development of the platform, costs incurred in delivering the correct regional version of BBC channels to customers and so on. It's clear too, that the costs are coming down from 2014 (which I think is the drop of £10m to £5m that has been talked about).

Whether or not Sky is right charging the BBC and other public service broadcasters these fees, is a separate question. But this isn't a market cost, but something that is solely in the gift of Sky.

I'd certainly argue that Sky does benefit strongly from having BBC channels on its platform. If for some reason they came off, then I can easily foresee lots of angry Sky customers unable to do things like record their favourite programmes on their Sky+ boxes. And it's worth noting that the BBC and Sky worked together last year during the Olympics to make space for all those extra sports channels providing unrivalled coverage of the games. Sky even spent money advertising the fact that these channels would be available.

I'm not altogether sure that all current Sky customers would be able to receive a DTT signal were BBC channels to come off the Sky EPG. While they'd remain on the other satellite service, Freesat, the lack of Freeview reception in remote parts of the country would almost certainly require some viewers in those areas, and others in flats, or with out of date aerials, to buy a new Freesat boxes to continue watching.

And the other thing not mentioned was the fact that US networks including Fox actually charge cable operators to carry their channels. As in the UK, those big networks still have the bulk of programming that viewers want to watch (although they've had a torrid time of it this year), and if a cable operator stopped carrying one of the big networks, they might well lose customers.

Sky's a commercial business, and I'm not surprised that they're fighting their corner on this one. But that doesn't make it right.

What else? I too watched the lovely documentary on Belfast's registry office - Love and Death in City Hall - last week and thought that it was terrific. But I don't want to see it spun off into a series. That's all too common these days - My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding started life as a one-off documentary, but then got spun out into a repetitive series that was creatively blank. There's nothing wrong with one-off documentaries coming along, leaving their mark, and then going. Sure, there are more "stories to tell" but it's just a ratings grab and rarely adds much. Ditto all the birth programmes and stories of A&E. In general I'm not a fan of this kind of thing, but I much prefer strands like Cutting Edge or the much missed 40 Minutes that give us a chance to be surprised. They won't always work, but they're much better creatively.

Sadly too late to make it into the podcast was the news that the BBC has cancelled its massive Digital Media Initiative. I've been trying to understand precisely what they were trying to achieve and failing to an extend. While having all its archive material digitised and searchable internally seems eminently sensible, it sounds like it was the efforts to build a bespoke BBC solution from the ground up that was its failing. And it would certainly seem bizarre to be trying to build internal tools that replicate the functionality of commercially available products from Avid, Adobe and Apple et al. £100m is a lot of money to lose on a project. Questions rightly need answering.

Finally, it wasn't highlighted anywhere, but I really liked this week's Sky Playhouse - Stage Door Johnnies. While I think that in general the series has had more misses than hits, this was a good one. Some great actors playing the kind of people who hang around theatre stage doors - in this case during a production of Romeo and Juliet starring Suranne Jones and John Nettles.

I miss "plays" of this nature, whether previously called Play for Today, Screen One or Screen Two amongst many others. It seems one-off films have to be much bigger these days, to be rolled out at Christmas. The only issue I have with Sky is that, perhaps understandably, they're desperate to have star names.

So while I think it'd be much better if new younger writers were given a go (sometimes it seems that the only routes in are writing for the Royal Court Theatre, or the BBC's Doctors), rather than pandering to big names who fancy "trying their hand" at writing or directing, and manage to cajole their mates along to help them out. If truth be told, I think that's also the reason that Sky's comedies haven't always lifted off. They have the talent, but they're giving them almost too much freedom.

Anyway, I shouldn't complain too much, because Sky is finally putting its money where its mouth is and investing in original UK productions aside from sports coverage.

And I'll leave the discussion about what happens with Global's situation for the time being. We're all awaiting the outcome with interest though!

Comments Fixed... Perhaps

2013-05-23T21:56:45Z

Just a note to say sorry to anyone who spent time commenting here and then saw their words disappear into a black hole claiming I'd be moderating. Something broke, and to be honest it's all sticking plasters and Sellotape behind the scenes. Anyway, I think it's working again. And I've put live what comments I've got from the last few days. I fear I may have lost a few though.

I should note that I only played with settings because I was getting a torrent of comment spam, most of which was getting posted come what may.

In the medium term I need to work on migrating this blog onto a more up to date blogging platform - and that's almost certainly Wordpress. And then I can also employ a more up to date commenting system.

In the meantime, here's a photo I took recently.

Some First Thoughts on the New Flickr

2013-05-21T10:31:44Z

A new look Flickr has been unveiled today (or last night). It seems to be part of Marissa Meyer's attempt to make Yahoo more relevant. And of course Yahoo has also just paid an awful lot of money for Tumblr. Yahoo is a company without the letter "e".

What follows is based on some very limited time spent using the new look site, and what immediately comes to mind for someone like me. I should first say that I've been a Flickr user since 2005, and currently have upwards of 10,000 photos on the site. That doesn't represent "all" my photos however. I tend to treat Flickr as a site to show off the photos I want made public or shareable. My own NAS archive has upwards of 100,000 photos to put that in perspective. And there are still many photos and negatives that don't exist in digital form.

In general I find the new look better. Gone are the white spaces, and every centimetre of monitor space is handed over to photos. Perhaps it's a tad over-zealous, but it's better than what we had before, which seemed unchanged since I became a Flickr member.

Photos by default are now on a black background - a lightbox view. This works well with my photos, and I have no objections. However, I do think that users should be able to choose between white and black. If I were an illustrator, or use predominantly light/pale colours in my photos, white might suit them better.

I don't actually mind too much that descriptions, tags, EXIF and comments are below the fold. Perhaps this will have a knock on effect with the community aspect of Flickr, but I still like the maximised use of space.

In places the new look feels a bit rushed. There are signs of the old website still here and there. If they really did rush this redesign then they've done well to make it as smooth as it is. There are some rough edges to be sanded off though. And a bit more flexibility from a user perspective wouldn't go amiss.

The big thing is that they've giving everyone 1TB of space for their photos. There's no two ways about it. This is a lot. They've done what Gmail did when they launched against Hotmail, and blow their rivals out of the water with regard to space. Google had only recently made a big issue about their unified 15GB of space. This is a clear retort to that.

But if everyone gets 1TB, then why would I pay for "unlimited" space? Well the "Pro" account is going. I've paid $25 a year for nearly my entire time on Flickr. And my 10,000 photos in JPG format wouldn't take anything like that amount of space. So in many regards, the space doesn't really matter because nobody (well, hardly anybody) is going to use it. But free does introduce ads. So Flickr is now offering a $50 option to go ad-free. I believe that I'll be "grandfathered" on my $25 account - which includes stats as well. But would I pay $50 to remove ads? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure that Flickr would earn anything like that much from me. It feels a bit high, and I'm not sure I understand that part of the model.

I certainly don't understand their "Doublr" option which gives me 2TB for $500! OK, anybody who needed that amount would clearly have more than 1TB and therefore be in the top 0.05% of users in terms of space used. But $500 is absurd. If you're using that amount of space then you really shouldn't be using Flickr for your photographic needs. In any case, there are much better options for that kind of storage in the cloud at much better prices. I can only assume it's some kind of psychological device to make consumers believe that they're getting $500 value for free with their first terabyte.

You would imagine that even now, Flickr engineers are making it very easy to send photos to Tumblr blogs (there is a Tumblr button already). The marketing message of the "1TB of data" seems to be that we upload every photo we have to Flickr rather than just our selects. Then sharing specific pictures to social media or a Tumblr blog is where we curate? In any case, say you have an interest in steam engines. In amongst your regular photos you probably have a few steam engine specific photos. Sharing those to Tumblr where your steam engine enthusiast friends can see them makes sense.

I must admit I've never quite "got" Tumblr. The long lists of people who "like" or "reblogged" things never entirely makes sense. And does "reblogged" mean "steal"? I'll stick with this blog thanks!

Allied to all this, there's a very decent upgrade to the Flickr Android app, and overall I'd say that they're on the right path. I think the service still needs some tweaks and clean-up. But it's heading in the right direction.

Whether coming weeks and months make me regret anything I've said here remains to be seen...

[Update] One more obvious problem is the constantly unclickable footer of the homepage! As you scroll down to click on it, more photos load. It needs to be moved!

And I'm a little confused about the whole "stats" thing. It's being sold as something "Pros" get. But it's not mentioned in any of the now available plans. So if I join up today and pay nothing, $50 or $500, it's not clear that I get any stats. To be honest, I'm not sure that this should be considered that special! I'd expect any site to give me that kind of granularity. You get it on YouTube for example.

Solargraphy

2013-05-20T13:27:53Z

When I was up in Derby earlier in the year for the Format festival, I ran across Leicester Lo-Fi Photography . They were helping people build their own pinhole cameras. So I made one using an old Coke can.

I put this camera, gaffer-taped to the wall by the window where I sit, and left it for three weeks. This is the result.

That streak across the top is probably some Coke that hadn't been completely drunk. A bit of a shame, but this truly is a basic camera - photographic paper inside the camera with just a pinhole letting light in. The photo has been inverted and flipped to get the correct perspective.

In the background you can just about make out the BT Tower. Interestingly, in the foreground is a building that started to get clad in scaffolding while the camera was out. But you can barely see that because it was only there for roughly half the time.

Anyway, a very successful first attempt. I need to make some more now!

2013-05-20T11:13:26Z

Over the weekend, CNN published an interesting US-focused series entitled "The future of music radio" that looked at the current state of play in US music radio.

While the US is very different market to the UK, it would be very complacent of the UK radio industry to completely write off what's happening there.

Do you remember rock 'n' roll radio? - Takes a pretty broad look at the challenges facing radio, and the changes that have been made.

The kings of the radio: All-time great DJs - "US" is missing from the headline, although this is a US site. But a useful primer of who has gone before in American radio.

Radio's last stand - Some audio to accompany the other pieces looking at one of the few major market stations that isn't part of a big group.

Who needs radio? I'll take the Web - Something nobody in radio wants to read. This isn't always true for everyone. But it's true for some.

Clear Channel chief: Technology 'an opportunity, not a risk' - An interview with Bob Pitman of Clear Channel.

Photos: A dose of independent radio.

You may agree with some of this. You may disagree. But it's worth a read anyway.

And while I'm linking to US radio sites, there was also a very interesting piece examining audio meter usage in the US and contrasting it with things like FitBits and Jawbones - those little tracker meters that you carry around to measure your activity. Given that it's in your own interest to carry the meter to measure your walking and so on, it's scary how little people truly do carry them. The authors wonder whether this is indicative of how many radio hours are being "missed" with people meters.

RAJAR Q1 2013 - London

2013-05-17T10:16:53Z

I've updated the previous entry, but I thought it was worth giving London an entry of its own because not only have I added back a Motion Chart of the London marketplace, but there's significantly more data underlying it than I've managed for the national chart.

Now you can examine the marketplace in lots of sub-demos including age groups, socio-economic class, sex and digital listening.

That all makes for plenty of interesting trends over time. Examine the growth of digital listening in the capital, with Radio 4 leading the way. Or see how once upon a time, Kiss had 15-24s to itself, but in recent times Radio 1 and Capital have improved in this area, while Kiss has seen its share fall. Or see how Radio 4 is serving more 65+ year olds than ever before (well since Q1 2000 when this data starts).

Lots to play with.

And for a bigger-screen experience, look at the larger version.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 31 March 2013, Adults 15+.

Disclaimer: These are my own views, although they're based on work I've done for Absolute Radio, and through whom I get access to the data. I also sit on the RAJAR Technical Management Group representing commercial radio. Just so you know.

RAJAR Q1 2013

2013-05-15T23:01:00Z

It has been a big radio week already with the Sony Radio Academy Awards on Monday. And next week will be big with the final Competition Commission ruling on its attempted takeover of GMG's radio assets.

But let's look at the latest RAJAR which is released today.

At first glance this quarter might look less than spectacular with few obvious stories emerging at first glance. But that isn't quite the case.

First up is Radio 2, a station I recently described as a behemoth. And it continues to be just that, with yet another set of record reach and hours this quarter. Nobody really knows if there's any way of stopping it. Chris Evans gets increased figures as a result (up 2.9% on the last quarter) and close to one in three UK radio listeners listen to the station at some point during the week. That's quite scary given the breadth of radio we have on offer in this country.

On the other hand, Radio 1 has had something of a tumble. It's seen reach fall 7.5% on the quarter and 7.9% on the year, but it's also seen time spent listening drop 9.1% on the quarter and a massive 20.1% down on the year. It's one thing if a small station falls to that extent, but Radio 1 is the third most listened to station in the country, so that kind of swing is very significant. Indeed Radio 4 is now bigger than Radio 1 - something that hasn't been the case in the past. And that's not because Radio 4 has grown especially (it's flat on the quarter and up 4.4% on the year). I'll return to Radio 1 in a while.

It may seem self-serving to list my own employer near the top of what I hope is a fairly unbiased report on RAJAR, but it's true to say that the Absolute Radio Network has had some really good figures seeing its overall listening hours reach a record level, up 9.2% on the quarter and 22.6% on the year. To put that in perspective, you'd have to go back to 2001 to find a time when the team at One Golden Square (then Virgin Radio of course) had more hours.

This growth has been driven by its digital stations. Absolute 80s has close to its biggest ever reach and hours, in turn seeing it overtake other large digital commercial stations like The Hits, Smash Hits and Planet Rock. Absolute Radio 90s also has record high figures, and nearly all the other services have contributed. In a week that saw Christian O'Connell pick up two Sony Golds, he's also had a decent increase at breakfast.

Elsewhere Classic FM has had a good quarter, while Talksport has had a so-so one with reasonable hours, but a reach that has now firmly slipped below three million.

Radio 3 has had a decent quarter with double digit growth on the year, while Radio 4's performance has been solid as mentioned above. Five Live has good reach, but time spent listening seems to have fallen off recently. They've just had a bit of a schedule shake-up of course.

6 Music and Radio 4 Extra haven't managed to maintain their reach momentum, although 6 Music's hours are at a record high.

Disappointingly, the gap between the BBC and commercial radio has been widened a bit, with the BBC now having 55.7% of listening compared with commercial radio's 41.9%.

Across the groups, Global is flat on the quarter in terms of listening, while Bauer at first glance seems to have had a good performance, up 4.5% on Q4 2012. However, this growth is due to its new ownership of Planet Rock, and indeed without it, its share would have slipped a fraction.

In the Midlands, the Orion group has turned in decent quarter on quarter numbers, and Jazz FM will be pleased with its hours.

What about breakfast? Well Chris Evans aside, the attention tends to fall on Nick Grimshaw, and the instant novelty of him taking over has rubbed off a little bit. It's early days of course, but he's down just over 900,000 listeners on the previous quarter are 1.3m on Chris Moyles' numbers this time last year. Time spent listening is particularly bad for him year on year - perhaps a product of the vast amount of speech there used to be in Moyles' show.

In London, the correct answer to the question "What is the most listened to breakfast show?" should always be the Today Programme on Radio 4. And that remains the case with very nearly twice as many listeners as its next nearest competitor, Radio 1. Dave and Lisa are just behind that, maintaining their advantage in spite of the station's overall disappointing performance. Heart and Magic have done reasonably, but Kiss is the big faller this time around losing 18% of its audience on the last quarter. Interestingly, Christian O'Connell gets significantly more listening than all his commercial competitors with the exception of Capital despite being further down the table in terms of reach. Those who listen, listen a lot!

Let's get on to digital. The first quarter each year usually sees a decent upturn in digital listening since DAB radios remain a very popular Christmas gift. And that's still true with now 34.3% of all listening being digital, up from 33.0% last quarter. What's more 26 million people or 40% of the population listen to digital radio every week - an increase of 2.6 million on last year.

Last time out, I said that we should keep an eye on internet listening as it jumped up quite a bit. This quarter, for the first time, internet listening has reached 5.0% and is level with digital TV listening. Clearly with lots more smartphone and tablet ownership, along with improved radio apps and streaming services, more and more radio is being delivered over IP.

In London, it hasn't been an altogether good quarter in commercial radio. While All Radio listening is essentially flat (down 0.3% in listening hours on the previous quarter), listening to commercial radio is down 3.4% on the last quarter and 5.0% on the year. The BBC meanwhile has gained some, but not all, of that listening.

That's why we've seen the big London commercial stations all take hits this quarter with Capital, Heart, Kiss and Magic all seeing declines in listening hours, especially if you look at year on year performances.

Global will be especially worried about Capital and Heart. Both have just over 9m hours, but in each case, that represents the lowest listening figure they've ever recorded since the current RAJAR methodology began in 1999. Indeed, in Capital's case, you probably have to go way back into its 40 year history. There are bright shoots over at Xfm, but it's not a good picture.

Indeed, the BBC has overtaken commercial radio in the capital in terms of listening share. While this has happened before, traditionally London has always been stronger for commercial services.

(Interestingly, "Other Radio" listening is up 44% on the quarter in the capital. That is listening to non-RAJAR measured stations including community and internet radio services. It's up on a small base, but "Other Radio" is up from 2.1% of listening to 3.1%)

Let me just return to Radio 1. There's an issue here with its results, and it's something I return to all too often. Radio has to work harder to keep younger listeners because it's losing them. Over the past five years, overall radio listening has stayed essentially flat (up 0.1%), but amongst 15-24 year olds it has fallen 16.9%. And if you look at 15-19 year olds it has fallen further - down 29.4%. The chart below goes back further than 5 years, but you can see the picture.

Look at the same chart for Radio 1 listeners. Over the same last five years, Radio 1 has seen listening fall by 38.1% amongst 15-24s and 40.9% amongst 15-19s.

By the way, I'm certain that both BBC, and indeed commercial groups that have stations that target this demographic, are doing what they can to stem the flow. It's in their interests after all. But we can't pretend that YouTube, Spotify, Rdio and now Google, aren't all having some kind of effect on radio listening. We need to try harder as an industry.

Finally, let's get back to my usual Google Motion Chart which I've updated again.

The first is the national picture. Although I've now increased the space on this blog which allows these charts to be bigger, I'd still recommend that you play with the larger version of the chart.

[Update]

I've added back a London version of this bubble chart. You may find it easier to use the larger version, but it's worth noting that there are a few more demographics in the London version of the chart including ages and digital listening! So do play with the different variables available and don't just stick with the default state which usefully displays Reach v Reach %.

For more on RAJAR visit:

The official RAJAR site

Radio Today for a digest of all the main news

Media UK for lots of numbers and charts

One Golden Square for more Absolute Radio details

Paul Easton for analysis

Media Guardian for more news

Matt Deegan usually has plenty to say

And there are always RAJAR Smilies

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 31 March 2013, Adults 15+.

[Amended to correct a fact about Absolute 80s]

Woods

2013-05-15T08:03:26Z

Woods from Adam Bowie on Vimeo.

Shot as an excuse to try that tracking feature you can do in After Effects. Music chosen because I saw Philip Glass play later that evening. The tracking was done with a Mobislyder, and the video on a Sony RX100. If there's one thing I'm coming to realise about the Mobislyder, it's that a cool hand and plenty of attempts are required to get good motion. That's particularly the case if you're focusing closely. It's also hard to get the speed right.

Sony Radio Academy Award Winners 2013

2013-05-14T07:36:48Z

So last night in a hot and sweaty room where the tables were just that bit too close together, this year's Sony Awards were handed out.

Absolute Radio did rather well, and I suspect that there may be a few sore heads around the station today.

Most of the press seems to be leading on John Humphrys for his interview that dovetailed into the BBC DG resigning. But I think it's fair to recognise BBC Radio 5 Live as the overall Station of the Year, especially in an Olympic year. I think they really did capture the mood of the nation over those two short weeks.

Eddie Mair's star continues to rise with a win as Best Speech Broadcaster of the Year, and Issy Suttie's comedy win is well worthy of it. There's a new series from her that's just started on Radio 4 which, along with Down The Line being back, is an unmissable comedy strand right now. Richard Herring won bronze incidentally - I think the only non-radio award of the evening.

Richard Park won the Special Award for an incredible run over nearly five decades in radio, while Steve Lamacq won the Gold award for his contribution to music radio.

The Today Programme was somehow adjudged (see, you can use that word outside of football!) better than Christian O'Connell and Chris Evans - not a decision that would be easy to make. Metro won the Battle of Tyneside, and Classic FM won Brand of the Year.

I really don't like new "Sony Golden Headphones" Award - which I'm not sure counts as a Sony Award proper. I suspect that it was introduced to broaden the appeal of the Sonys amongst the public at large. The idea is that it was a popularity contest and every presenter in the country was able to win it. Except that was never the case. It was always going to go to someone on a big station (sorry local commercial radio presenters), and it was always going to go to a winner who could "get out the social media vote" (sorry presenters not fully utilising this or forced to use a station generic Twitter/Facebook account). So the fact that the first winners are Dan & Phil from Radio 1 - perhaps the most "hooked up" presenters on the biggest youth orientated station in the country, isn't a surprise. For all I know, they're brilliant. But popularity contests don't belong in the Sonys. They become the equivalent of the TV Quick awards or something.

The full list of winners is here.

And yes, I'll put up my complete list of winners in the next few days to put it all in perspective over the longer haul.

Viewing Options

2013-05-10T10:57:22Z

Here's a curious thing.

The new Ben Wheatley film, A Field in England, is getting a truly multi-media launch on 5th July, by getting a simultaneous release in cinemas, on DVD, on video-on-demand and on the free-to-air Film4 channel!

Having enjoyed both Kill List and Sightseers immensely, I'm really looking forward to Wheatley's paranoid fantasy set during the English Civil War.

And I'm also really interested and excited by new distribution mechanisms. I've written frequently on the pain of watching films in multiplexes where customer service can be poor, and nobody really cares if your enjoyment is spoilt by fellow patrons. So giving me a choice of viewing opportunities is an interesting idea.

We've seen similar releases to this before. Ken Loach's Route Irish got a Sky Box Office release, and lower budget horror films often get a very short cinema release - sometimes just a weekend - to collect some publicity ahead of a Monday DVD release. Curzon has its On Demand service that lets those not lucky enough to live within easy travelling distance of an arthouse cinema, watch some films on demand at the time of their cinema release (more titles please!).

What's different here is the free-to-air Film4 broadcast. While Film4 isn't an HD channel anywhere aside from Virgin Media currently (coming soon to Sky though?), and it has advertising breaks, I'd have thought this singular route might severely impact on the others.

Yes, some will want to watch the film at the cinema with a live Q&A link-up - the Picturehouse chain is another great little chain (even though it's now in bigger hands). Others might like to own the DVD for their collection. But I can't for the life of me think of a reason why someone would pay for the video-on-demand transmission over the free-to-air broadcast. I suppose you might not be in on Friday night, or you may have neglected to schedule a recording on your PVR.

I'll be really interested to see the results of this, although I can't help thinking that they won't make quite as much money as they might. That said, you have to experiment, and cinema is certainly going to have to adapt to survive into the future. Assuming that we want to see more than Iron Man XXIII etc.

News Picture Quality

2013-05-07T21:26:25Z

Is the quality of the video we're being served on the news decreasing over time? I rather suspect it is.

What am I talking about? Well go back to last Wednesday morning, and watch BBC Breakfast. This is a programme with a significant viewership and sizeable resource. But one of the items on the programme was about an interview and a book that Amanda Knox has written. We were shown a recorded report on what she had been saying, and then went live to BBC reporter Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. Bowes was sitting in a studio wearing a suit and was miked up.

However the pictures and sound seemed to have been delivered via IP and the quality was similar to what you'd expect from Skype on modest broadband connection. That is to say, the video quality was not even SD (never mind HD) and there were lots of interruptions and cutting in and out. There were also sizeable delays between the Salford studio and remote location making conversation difficult. And this is coming from one of the biggest cities in the US.

In recent weeks I've seen similar types of connectivity from places like Reykjavik to Sydney. I've just seen similarly poor-quality video from another major US city - Cleveland.

Look - I understand that if the pictures are coming live from some war torn part of the world, or the correspondent is undercover somewhere like Zimbabwe, the pictures will not be great.

But satellite technology is smaller than ever, and if Sky News is able to broadcast live footage of one of its reporters being "arrested" and taken away in a van from Tiananmen Square, then I'm sure that in a major western city with all its connectivity, we are capable of getting better pictures. And ironically, while pictures from Cleveland were low-quality, the same bulletin had a perfect HD satellite link-up with Islamabad in Pakistan.

I realise that budgets are being cut, and when the technology works well, IP can be an excellent solution for delivery. But given that the average size of televisions is getting larger and larger, and we're moving from HD to 4K, the idea that sub-SD internet footage is acceptable is just wrong. If connectivity is not robust enough and of decent quality, then lets not go around ditching satellite just yet.

Is Summer Arriving?

2013-05-07T13:00:23Z

Sony Radio Academy Awards - A Look Back

2013-05-06T14:00:00Z

The Sony Radio Academy Awards are upon us in a week or so's time.

But if you want to get a broader view of who has won what over the years since the awards started in 1983 (and have always been sponsored by Sony)... then you're out of luck.

The official website has details for 2010 to date, but if you want to look further back then you'll be doing well. The previous website is now "closed." But even if you use the Wayback Machine to access snapshots of that site, the old website only goes back to 2005, and the Sonys have been around quite a bit longer than that.

If you search somewhere like Media Guardian, you may find details going a few years further back. But not a great deal further.

The internet will reveal some details here and there. Perhaps the odd radio forum has some details. But it's an incomplete list and often, only the Gold winners are recorded.

Certainly your regular "go to" website - Wikipedia - is exceptionally poor. Probably because like I found, there's really very limited data online.

Perhaps if you've got a complete paper collection of The Radio Magazine, then you might have some better luck. And some back issues of Broadcast magazine may also be of some help.

If you subscribe to the right online services, perhaps you have access to national press reports down the years. But such reports are likely to be incomplete highlighting perhaps just a few big names and not the smaller winners. Even if you broaden the search to local newspapers you're probably looking at quite a gargantuan task.

So broadly speaking, you're out of luck.

Part of me thinks that this is indicative of the poor state of affairs of radio at looking after its own history - David Lloyd aside! And partly it's of the awards not perhaps always getting the coverage they deserve.

So I've been meaning for ages to do something about this.

Sometime back in 2008 I managed to get hold of a paper printout of all the award winners of all the awards made to that date. I've added more recent awards and nominees, and I'm pretty happy the cumulative list is as accurate as anywhere.

This was not an insignificant undertaking, taking many hours. I used that paper list, some bulk scanning, OCR-ing, and a lot manual correction. And I had to wrangle all that data into some kind of sensible and useful format. You can understand why I've been "sitting" on that list for quite some time. However, I've come to the point where I'm happy with my database.

But I can't be certain, and there may be errors in it.

I may have transcribed something wrongly, or I may be missing data. I've tried to put stations into groups, but that's not necessarily completely accurate since ownership structures change (and I'm therefore avoiding summarising wins by groups accordingly).

Stations change names too - sometimes quite a great deal. I've used the names as they were originally stated aside from some cleaning up to overcome "branding" exercises. So once it had been given the "Live" soubriquet, I've called it "BBC Radio 5 Live" rather than "BBC Radio Five Live" as it was known for a while. On the otherhand BBC Radio 5 continues to exist on its own. I've tried to be consistent with uppercase "FM"s even when there were phases when marketing departments loved the lowercase "fm".

But do let me know if you spot any howling errors once I put the whole thing up.

I can't claim to be an expert on the Sony Awards. I've only watched from afar, and have little detail about how they're run and judged. But for most of their history, Gold, Silver and Bronze awards have been made in most categories. The exceptions tend to be the "big" awards such as the various "Station of the Year" awards where only a Gold is handed out. Runners up are simply "Nominees" in those instances.

However in the data that I was able to collate, I only have a note of the Gold awards for the first couple of years. It may be that on a single winner was handed out per category at that time. I'm not sure. But it's only in 1985 that I have a note of Silver and Bronze awards as well.

And aside from some commendations, I only have details of the full lists of nominees and not just winners, from 2000. So there are probably quite a few nominees missing.

Today if you visit the official website, there are enormously full lists of every producer and assistant responsible for any nominated show. But that certainly hasn't been the case for all that long, at least in the records that I've obtained. I've collated a "Production" category, but with the exception of a few IRNs and BBC Externals, it's only from 1992 onwards that a few independent production companies' names start creeping in. Around the same time, some BBC department names, and notably, commercial radio news teams, get credited for productions.

Of course these aren't in any way consistent over time. In particular, BBC internal departments seem to be named according to the whim of whichever individual put the entry in. And that's before you take account of those departments regularly changing names semi-regularly.

It's also not always clear whether a person has received a Gold Award for their work in either BBC Radio or commercial radio, or just radio in general. Sometimes the person has only worked in one place, but these days many have stepped across the line, and may well have started out on commercial radio. Either way, some awards aren't categorised as either BBC or Commercial wins.

So having collated all this data, what does it tell us?

Richard Park won Local Radio Personality of the Year on Radio Clyde in the very first Sony Awards back in 1983. I wonder whatever happened to him?

Other things to note from that very first set of awards: Terry Wogan won Best Popular Music Programme, while Woman's Hour won Best Magazine Programme and The World This Weekend won Best Current Affairs Programme. So some things in radio never change.

Radio Active won Best Light Entertainment Programme, and Sue MacGregor and Brian Johnston won, respectively, Female and Male Personalities of the Year.

It must be said that 1983 was fairly dominated by the BBC. Only Piccadilly Radio, Radio Clyde, both with two awards and Essex Radio and Radio City, each with one, broke the stranglehold.

The other Radio Clyde award, though, was for Best Actress reminding us that once upon a time, commercial radio did actually do drama!

The number of drama awards has decreased over time, but I can't help noticing that having Best Actor and Actress categories did allow some very big names to win awards and, one would imagine, add some glamour to some evenings. Glenda Jackson, Joss Ackland, Tim Piggot Smith, Jane Asher, Anna Massey, Patricia Routledge, Ronald Pickup, Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Billie Whitelaw all won awards during the first few years of the Sonys.

One of the things people often note about the Sonys is the number of awards. This chart suggests that they're probably right (although any joint awards are double-counted in this instance). Last year, the number of awards dropped though.

Incidentally, given that the number of awards is criticised so often by some media coverage, I thought I'd look at how many BAFTA TV Awards there are this year. After all, they get presented the night before the Sony's. This year there are 26 awards on the night compared with radio's 28 named awards (although I suspect that there'll be a Gold Award and possibly another special award on the night). However BAFTA also has the Craft awards which have just been awarded - that's another 20 awards.

But how do those awards breakdown between the BBC and Commercial Radio?

Well clearly, the awards are more level pegging these days, and the gap is being closed. As I mentioned, the "unstated" are simply awards made to people above and beyond BBC or Commercial considerations. There have also been the odd joint award between BBC and Commercial that has been ignored here.

If we look at the most successful stations over time, there's one thing that stands out - Radio 4 has a lot of Sonys.

Note that I've only considered Golds here, and awards shared across more than one station have been ignored. I've also left brands alone. Virgin Radio and Absolute Radio would jump up the list if they were a single brand for example.

It does look like Radio 4 is winning slightly fewer awards per year over time though.

What else does a deep dig reveal?

Radio City does well in the early years with Clive Tyldesley winning on a couple of occasions for sport. These days, he's ITV's lead football commentator.

The Local Radio Personality of the Year in 1985 was Allan Beswick on Red Rose Radio. 28 years later, he's still in the north west, now presenting breakfast on BBC Radio Manchester. In 1985, Beswick pipped James Whale to the post - Whale won a silver for his Radio Aire show.

And yes, we do still remember the short stint when it was simulcast on ITV!

From the start there had been an award for Local DJ of the Year. But clearly that discriminated against Radio 1 presenters. So in 1986 the National DJ of the Year category was invented. The problem was that it became an exclusive competition between Radio 1 jocks. I guess that theoretically Radio 2 presenters might have entered, but they probably didn't even consider themselves "DJs" at that time.

In 1987 Mike Smith won Gold, doing the double in 1988 (by which time it was sponsored by Smash Hits). In 1989 and 1990 Bruno Brookes won, before Simon Mayo won in 1991 and 1992. So while it wasn't quite simply a reflection of who was presenting the Radio 1 breakfast show at the time, it was a good indicator.

It wasn't until 1989 that an award for the Best Breakfast Show was first introduced. The initial award saw Les Ross beat Chris Tarrant and Dave Bussey to the Gold.

In 1991 Network Africa on the BBC World Service for Africa beat Chris Tarrant to the Gold in what must have been an extraordinary decision to have to make. Perhaps it wasn't then surprising that by 1992 the award had been broken up into music and speech based categories.

But by 1993, the INRs had begun to launch with Classic FM first out of the blocks. In a curious amendment to the breakfast show awards, music was further split into "contemporary music" and "non-contemporary" music. Somehow Classic FM managed to win Gold and Silver in that category. "Non-contemporary" only lasted another year before the award reverted to a simple speech and music delineation.

In the early years, split awards were relatively frequent. But sometime in the last ten years or so, stricter rules seem to have been applied, and there's only one winner per category nowadays. In any case, the rules were clearly a little arbitrary before. Sometimes if two Golds were handed out, then there'd be no Silver and just a Bronze. But other times, essentially four stations would be handed awards.

By the start of the 1990s following the split of AM and FM into separate services on local commercial radio, we begin to see the "Gold" services win awards. Piccadilly Radio 1152 and Capital Gold were early winners.

Lots of names of stations that are no longer with us. London Talkback Radio anyone? (It was one of LBC's myriad of ill-fated name changes in the late 80s and early 90s before they sensibly returned to calling themselves LBC).

The first Station of the Year award was made in 1989 when BRMB won, beating BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio Foyle. What's odd is that there was no national station of the year until later. I assume that's because it'd have been a competition between BBC stations - a clearly impossible comparison that perhaps the BBC wasn't keen to make. Again we had to wait until just before the INRs started in 1992/3 for Wear FM to win an overall "Station of the Year" award beating out Clyde 2 and BBC Radio Newcastle. LAter, of course, delineations between station sizes were made.

From the beginning of the Sony's there was clearly a need to make some "Lifetime Achievement" types of awards to longstanding people within the radio industry. I'd have thought that "Lifetime Achievement" might have been a good title. But no, the title chosen that just tripped off the tongue was "Sony Gold for Outstanding Contribution to Radio Over the Years."

Yes - "Over the Years!"

The winners, however, were rather fine. Between 1983 and 1990 awards were handed to Frank Muir and Denis Norden, David Jacobs, BFBS, John Timpson, The Archers, Gerard Mansell (who created Radio 4), Tony Blackburn and Roy Hudd.

They later came up with better names for the award, and today we know it as The Gold Award.

Categories have been and gone in the Sonys. Quite a lot in fact. I don't think a single category has been unchanged in the history of the awards. 1991 saw the last Children's Programming Award at a time when BBC Radio 5 was one of the few places children could get radio. These days it's either Fun Kids or the internet of course.

And the Internet Award ran from 2007 until 2012, but has been scrapped this year, not a popular move amongst podcasters who now have to compete in the main categories should they choose to enter.

We do have the first "Brand of the Year" Award this year of course - something which I'm sure listeners will be very excited about.

If you talk to anyone about talent in UK radio, then a couple names show up all the time: Kenny Everett and John Peel.

So how kind have the Sony's been to them over all that time?

During the time that he could have won Sony Awards, Everett was broadcasting with Radio 2, Capital Radio and Capital Gold (after they split frequencies) through until 1994. But the first award he got was a Bronze in 1991 for his Capital Gold show for Best Sequence Programme (Jeff Owen on BBC Radio Nottingham won Gold, with John Dunn's Radio 2 show getting the Silver).

Then in 1994, as his broadcast career ended he was given the "Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Radio Over the Years."

And that's it. He's actually won more posthumously - with a further three based on archive material

John Peel has had a longer radio career starting with the birth of Radio 1 and continuing with the BBC until his death in 2004.

Peel won his first award in 1986 picking up the first National DJ of the Year. But it was another seven years before he won National Broadcaster of the Year in 1993. He then had to wait until 1999 when he won Silver for Talk/News Broadcaster of the Year and Gold for Home Truths. Home Truths also won Gold for Short Form Audio that year as well as the Weekend Talk/News Award.

He was nominated for Home Truths as Speech Broadcaster of the Year in 2001, and won The Gold Award in 2002.

In 2007 he posthumously also collected an award - The Broadcaster's Broadcaster Award.

So Peel was probably more honoured than Everett, although it seems more for Home Truths than his long running Radio 1 music programmes.

I'm probably being a little unfair here as it's always easier to have twenty-twenty hindsight. But perhaps even our industry doesn't really appreciate who we have while we have them.

Here's a nice tough trivia question. Which TV programme won a Sony Radio Award?

It was Blue by Derek Jarman in 1994 which was a Channel 4/BBC Radio 3 simulcast and won a Gold Drama Award. Jarman died in early 1994, probably before he received this award.

Back then few of us would have had stereo TVs, so you could tune in for a fuller soundscape on your FM radio. The picture was simply a blue screen the whole way through (Can you even begin to comprehend Channel 4 doing something like that today?). Blue is available on DVD.

One of my favourite comedy programmes of all time is On The Hour - the radio spoof from Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci et al, that would turn into The Day Today on television. In 1992 it won Silver, and was beaten by a BBC Radio Ulster programme (Perforated Ulster) in the Best Comedy/Light Entertainment Programme category. But On The Hour also introduced the world to Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge, and his spin-off series, Knowing Me, Knowing You won Gold the following year. It also headed to TV like so many radio comedies. Alan, of course, gets his own film based around his current station, North Norfolk Digital, later this year.

Virgin Radio got their first award in 1995 - a Silver for Russ & Jono in the "Breakfast Show: Music Based." They were beaten by Sarah Kennedy on Radio 2. Talk Radio won its first award - a Bronze - in 1996 with "There's Only One Gary Newbon" in the Response to a News Event category. Quite what that event was, I don't know.

The 1996 "Breakfast Show: Music Based" award is interesting because it features - in order - three Virgin Radio breakfast shows in a row. Gold that year went to Russ & Jono, the incumbents on Virgin. Silver went to the Chris Evans Breakfast Show who at the time was still on Radio 1 (Evans would join Virgin and take over breakfast of course). And Bronze went to the Steve Penk Breakfast Show on Key 103. When Evans was fired by Virgin, Penk stepped in to take over breakfast.

And while I'm talking about Virgin Radio, I can't help but note that in 2000 it managed to beat Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to the punch, being the first broadcast outlet to give away that much cash. But it still only managed to get a nomination in the competition category. The million pounds was also delivered outside a RAJAR period just to indicate how poorly conceived the plan was!

At the turn of the millennium, another new and interesting development started. In 2001 we got The 2000 Award - going to Terry Wogan. This was followed by the 2001 Award in 2002 and 2002 Award in 2003. Sometime around then, the madness stopped.

While it's clear that the categories awarded in the Sony's have been changed over time to make sure that there's a fairer split across different types of stations, you can't help feeling that news and speech based breakfast shows always feel that they're on a hiding to nothing when it comes to The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4.

But is that actually the case? Could it be possible that the excellence and journalistic resource that the programme has works against it? This is a list of all the Gold Awards that Today specifically has won over the last thirty years.

Best Current Affairs 1984, 1989
Best Response to a News Event 1989, 1990, 1994
Best Daily News Programme 1990
Best Breakfast Show: Speech Based 1992, 1995
News Award 1998 (shared)
News Coverage Award 2003
The Breakfast Show Award 2007
News Journalist of the Year 2007 (John Humphrys)
Breakfast Show of the Year 10m+ 2010

That's only 13 Gold awards which is probably surprisingly few all things considered.

(Note that others may have won awards for work partly carried out on Today, but I'm considering programme specific awards here).

To put this in perspective, I think PM has only won about four specific Gold awards over the same time. And I've not even looked at The World at One.

Here's another piece of trivia. Did you know the current editor of The Sun has a Sony Gold? Dominic Mohan has one for a 2003 Virgin Radio special on The Who.

A couple of notes:

I'm not aware that a record of the award winners is in any way copyright, but obviously I do not wish to tread on anybody else's toes. The awards did for many years belong to Zafer Associates, and they've recently been passed over to the Radio Academy. I'm not aware of any value in the data, and most of it is in the public domain (albeit, really hard to get hold of as I've said). Finding past BAFTA TV winners isn't as hard, although even Wikipedia entries trail off in the mid-nineties.

Nonetheless, I've not put the entire database - yet. Although post the 2013 awards, I will do so.

Please shout if you believe that this is not a good thing.

At least then, some diligent individuals can populate Wikipedia (I can't be bothered as getting the data this clean has taken me far too long). And we can continue to shout from the rooftops about great radio.

20 Years of Russ

2013-04-29T23:00:00Z

Today is the 20th anniversary of Virgin Radio. It launched at 12.15pm on Friday 30th April 1993 with Richard Branson joining Russ and Jono at the Virgin Megastore in Manchester. But Richard Skinner was back in the studio and played in the first track - a specially recorded version of Born To Be Wild by INXS. For legal reasons we're limited in what we can say about this on-air today, and in any case, we changed brands back in 2008, but there have been plenty of celebrations of Russ Williams' twenty years at One Golden Square.

However this is my blog, so I can dig out some old photos from the early years of Russ - usually with Jono.

And I've uploaded the launch audio to Audioboo. (David Lloyd's Audioboo channel is an absolute mine of superb radio, but I think this is cleaner audio since it wasn't recorded off-air!).

listen to ‘Launch Audio of Virgin 1215 AM’ on Audioboo

Happy twentieth Russ!

For the avoidance of doubt, this is a personal blog, and these are personal views. The fact that I work at the same station is neither here nor there.

A Day at Somerset House

2013-04-28T18:54:23Z

Somerset House always has a lot going on, and I managed to tie in three things I wanted to see at the same time this week.

Pick Me Up is their annual graphic arts fair which I've been going to for a few years now. Each year the curators choose artists for their Selects series which highlights up and coming artists from around the world. It being part fair as well as part gallery, everything is for sale. The prints are often in limited editions can cost anything from £5 to several thousand.

In the Selects this year, I particularly liked Ugo Gattoni who's book of Londoners cycling was came out last year and I've been meaning to pick up. I think that prints from this book formed some of the illustrations presented here.

Hattie Stewart's doodlings on magazine covers also catches the eye. William Goldsmith's peeks into a forthcoming graphic novel intrigue, and I did fall a little in love with some of Ping Zhu's characters.

What you notice about Pick Me Up is that even if you go at a quiet time, it's very busy. That's because lots of students - by the looks of things, from A Level upwards - are on visits. The other thing you notice is that everybody has a camera or phone, and they're documenting just about everything they see.

Ordinarily this would be frowned upon, but here it's practically encouraged. A heard a couple of artists explaining that this was an incredibly useful showcase of their work. So when they saw "suits" taking photos they know that commissioned work might come from it.

In any case, even if you no intention of commissioning work, your camera acts as an aide memoire to let you look up artists and collectives that you're interested in later.

I chose a particular day to go along because I knew that A Two Pipe Problem who produce letterpress prints would be there and making bespoke prints. I've always found typography fascinating and had something in mind to print. So despite being very quickly booked up, I managed to get a space to have something printed.

As well as a medium sized press, there were a selection of drawers, each containing one or more complete typefaces to choose from when putting together a print. Of course they also had some pre-printed posters available to buy. But nothing beats that personalised touch.

The process is relatively straightforward. The letters are chosen and then carefully spaced and arranged to ensure an even spread. Obviously laying out the words is something of a skill, and I was completely happy to go with professional suggestions.

"Up to a point, Lord Copper" was the phrase I had printed. It's the phrase uttered by the obsequious Mr Salter to Lord Copper, proprietor of the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Scoop - as I've mentioned before - is one of my favourite novels. Salter uses it when Lord Copper says something to which the answer is no. For example:

"Let me see, what's the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn't it?"

"Up to a point, Lord Copper."

Anyway, it's a phrase which actually means no. And given that Scoop is set in the world of newspapers, having it printed in hot metal (actually, i think it was wooden lettering) seems very appropriate.

And I got to pull the print myself!

The only thing I feel marginally disappointed about is that previously there were inexpensive prints from the featured Select artists available to buy, but for the last couple of years these have been replaced with a pack of large postcards. While they're nice, I preferred the prints.

Mind you, it's not as though there aren't lots of things to buy. I was very tempted by some of the offerings from groups and collectives on display upstairs. Handsome Frank had a very tempting cycling shirt print by David Sparshott and some lovely pictures from Malika Favre, who was also a featured artist downstairs (I preferred the Khemistry set to the Karma Sutra one).

Well worth visiting.

The other two things I wanted to see were two excellent photography exhibitions - one just about to finish and the other having just opened.

The Sony World Photography Awards had been announced the previous evening, and I was pleased that it wasn't too busy wandering around the wide variety of photos on display.

The overall winner was a series by Andrea Gjestvang, a Norwegian photographer who's shot a wonderful series of photographs of some of the survivors of the appalling massacre of the young on the island of Utoeya outside Oslo in July 2011. Some of those featured have suffered debilitating injuries, and there was a sense of resilience in the photos.

The photos are organised into a categories, and there really isn't a duff selection in there. Indeed my only complaint was that we were sometimes only getting a very small selection of a larger collection that had been entered into the awards.

William Eggleston was the featured photographer for a lifetime's work. A room of his photos of America from the sixties and seventies was wonderful. I love his photograph of a redhead sat at the counter of diner (disappointingly not in the catalogue).

A good selection of winning photos can be found at the In Focus section of The Atlantic website. But the pictures have featured widely in the press in recent days, including a good selection in middle of The Guardian (you need to see these pictures in a large scale).

At the end of the exhibition, Sony, the sponsor, presents a number of the pictures on a 4K TV that must have been about 60" in size. Seeing photos that way really is rather stunning. I'm not saying I prefer a screen to properly printed piece of paper. But for some images, it can really impress.

Across the Somerset House courtyard, another exhibition was just coming to the end of its run. Landmark: the Fields of Photography is a rather spectacular collection of landscape photographs from a broad variety of photographers. Edward Burtynsky always attracts the eye with his industrial landscapes, or landscapes affected by industry.

Mathieu Bernard-Raymond's Monuments are very clever and wondefully executed, putting physical stock price charts into landscapes, while Simon Roberts' We The English series is witty and clever.

All the photos are available on The Positive View Foundation's website.

At this point, I had planned on crossing the river to see the Norman Parkinson photos on display in the National Theatre. I can never get enough of his photo "The Art of Travel." But I had seen too much visual art for one day, so I left!