Recently in Internet Category

Let me first apologise for mentioning Christmas while we're still in November. I take no pleasure in bringing forward a retailing period that's already appearing far too early, and is very occassionally considered a religious festival (for goodness sake, a man died today in a stampede at 5am in Walmart in New York).

As someone who does more and more of his shopping online, I usually don't mind if the retailer emails me regular updates of special offers, perhaps based on my previous shopping habits. But I've noticed it getting worse and worse of late. Last year, in the run-up to final postal deadlines to receive goods in time for Christmas, all the major retailers were sending me at least one email a day. This is overkill.

This year, as a recession looms (unless we're in it already), it's already getting silly. My inbox is daily filling up with mail advertising that day's offers. More often than not, they're not really targeted at me based on any previous purchasers. The retailers effectively see it as free non-spam. I've elected to receive their email and they're going to make sure I receive it.

Well let me tell them that they're walking a very fine line. There is no reason for them to send quite the quantity that they are, and if it significantly increases from the current level, I'll be unsubscribing. At that point - they've lost me.

Email is not a replacement for other forms of media. It's more intrusive, but it's also something I can control, when I turn on the radio or television, or buy a newspaper, there's little I can do to determine whether or not I see the ads (PVRs excepted). But I can and will take too much junk email into my own hands.

So HMV, Argos, WH Smith and even Amazon - you better watch out. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's getting fed up with the bombardment.

There's a new series of The IT Crowd starting this week on Channel 4. Hurrah!

In the last series, one of the episodes opened with Roy and Moss sitting down to watch a DVD. We then saw a brilliant mock DVD piracy advert to warn viewers of how bad the criminals you're supporting are if you buy pirate DVDs.

We all hate these things - and they only ever show up on legal DVDs.

Anyway, I grabbed the video and put it on YouTube. It's 45 seconds long, and it's been there since September last year. Of course it's not mine, and there are loads of other versions of it online as well. Writer Graham Linehan obviously touched a nerve.

So how amusing today to get the following email:

Dear adambowie00,

Your video "Video Piracy" has been identified by YouTube's Content Identification program as containing copyrighted content which Channel 4 claims is theirs.

Your video "Video Piracy" is still available because Channel 4 does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as Channel 4 has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page.

As I've said, before, I'm happy that Channel 4 has an enlightened attitude to using YouTube like this.

But I can't be the only person to see the irony of the situation here...

BTW - I do of course own a copy of the boxset of Series 1 and Series 2 of The IT Crowd which are authored brilliantly! I would still advocate that an elightened attitude leads to more revenues in the long term.

These are interesting times for Kanagroo - the BBC Worldwide/ITV/C4 joint venture that, simply put, is supposed to do for commercial (and commercially sold) TV, what the iPlayer does for the BBC.

Last week Ashley Highfield quite the consortium after four months, having moved across from the BBC mothership to take charge. And a long piece in today's MediaGuardian suggests that the project has been ridden with internal politics.

It's also true that the venture has been knocked off its timetable by a Competition Commission investigation which attempts to identify whether the consortium would be monopolistic.

The problem with all of this is that it feels a little like the record companies all over again. I suppose the organisations are at least talking, and know that they have to do something and make some money. But exactly how and what seems to be the question.

In the meantime, iTunes steals a march on video as it has done with music. With its technology being locked to a single, fantastically popular, device line for music, it now has a say so over everything the music industry tries to do. They have to accept Apple's pricing or not be on the platform. They've lost control. Other players have attempted to use Microsoft's format which works with a wide range of non-Apple devices, but they have small market share and are clunky in their usability (see James' piece on his attempts to load some video on a WMV player recently).

The various MP3 offerings might be able to take this on, but they tend to be hampered by not having full offerings - the majors are missing from eMusic, Play.com's MP3 service offers only a subset of what's available on CDs without all the majors on board, and Amazon's MP3 service simply hasn't turned up so far this year despite promises to the contrary.

So iTunes has the whip hand.

And now the same is happening with TV. If you want to go out and download a film or TV show, you really only have one choice - iTunes. Certainly all the broadcasters offer their own services to a lesser or greater extent. But they're messy - usually streamed - and the user experience is not nice. Only the iPlayer can really compete - and it was actually a latecomer to the market with most of the other broadcasters long having since put their offerings live. The iPlayer has been well marketed - with catch-up reminders accompanying every trail on-air as well as bespoke trails for the service.

There's nowhere else to go. It's not even as though iTunes is actually that good for film and TV. The TV is largely US fare with a limited amount of British TV. That's one of the reasons the Competition Commission got involved of course - one gets the impression that ITV and C4 are holding their programming back to a certain extent. And films are slow to arrive on the platform, often only being available to buy in the first instance, with less profitable rentals coming later (This is unlike Blockbuster, who needs to recoup the cost of each DVD - so multiple rentals on release make sense, as well as offering the copies for sale. Apple on the other hand, does not need to "recoup" a download's cost, so it prefers to "sell" at a higher price rather than "rent" a digital download).

For a strong and healthy marketplace, we need more than one major operator, which is why it's important that Kangaroo gets off the ground. Of course, ir's important that programming is not limited to one supplier - I want to able to choose buy the new Indy film (or not) in HMV, Zavvi, Sainsburys or ASDA. But delays in getting the project off the ground just makes Apple stronger. As it did for music, it has already positioned itself in a good place for portable video with DRM attached (and that, sadly, is going to be necessary in the short-term). That's not to say that other deals can't be done - the Sony PSP is an obvious route to market as well as Windows Media video devices. Deals with mobile phone operators would be good, although the manufacturers and networks tend to want you to use their own offerings rather than those of third-parites. But don't mess around - and get cracking!

We do now hear that a trial will launch in January following an alpha next month. This is ahead of possible approval from the Competition Commission in late January next year or early February. The sooner the better...

I got invited along to the launch of a mobile phone the other day - the INQ1 (pronounced "Ink"). But just calling it a mobile phone is a bit harsh - it's more of a communications device than anything.

It comes from a new company who are looking to target people for who iPhones, Blackberrys, and Nseries Nokias are out of their price range (or desire). These are great, but expensive devices, and that means that the bulk of the market aren't interested in them. (I, of course, am interested in them, and currently quite like my Nokia N82).

What INQ has done is produce a device that serves a purpose and does it well. This, if you like, is the Facebook phone. Indeed we got a pre-recorded message from Mark Zuckerberg (a bit wooden, but then he's not an actor), telling us how much he loved it. Facebook is essentially built into the phone, along with Skype, eBay, MS Live Messenger et al. What is very clever, and has been done nowhere else, is the way it imports your contacts from these social networks into the phone.

So your Facebook contacts are now your phone contacts, along with photo profiles, and other data. The phone grabs similar data from your other networks and then lets you merge the various people together. You have to do this because in one system I might be "Adam Bowie", in another "A Bowie" and in another... well something very different.

The always on nature of the phone along with the built-in all-you-can-eat data seems good value, and it means that your Facebook updates ping the phone as they come through.

This is a basic phone, but at a reasonable PAYG price point or free on contract, it's going to appeal to a lot of people who don't need all the bells and whistles but just want internet connectivity wherever they go.

What is clear is that INQ and Three do seem to understand the market, and where there's a gap in it. I think that this could be pretty popular.

Disclaimer: I was invited to this launch presentation, and was given a memory stick, a poster and a t-shirt. So I think I'm being impartial!

Apologies upfront for the rawness of this text. I'll tidy it up later.

To Radio at the Edge (where there's some free WiFi), to hear about the latest goings on in the audio world.

After introductions from James Cridland, and an opening from Nick Wallis, a familiar face - to me at least - Clive Dickens, presented the changes that have been made as Virgin Radio changed to Absolute Radio.

This included the Google Trends information as well as details about our ongoing advertising campaign.

Finally, Clive talked about Open Mic, a new initiative to talk to the Absolute audience about what the station is doing right, and what it's doing wrong.

DAB - Dead and Buried?

James Ashton of the Sunday Times introduced the session reading out a series of stats about the state of play with digital radio in a basically very factual manner including set sales, and recent things that have happened with Channel 4 Radio and the question over what Global will do with Digital One.

Tony Moretta of the DRDB opened things up with a "defence" of DAB radio - one in three households have a device, with 14m people listening a week. And these people listen to more services.

He confronted what he called urban myths noting that it was the "only" way to hear stereo Absolute outside London (not strictly true if you listen via TV or online, but very important, certainly). He said that 88% of people rated audio quality as good to excellent. "DAB doesn't work in cars" - well it doesn't if you don't have an in-car DAB, he pointed out.

He also said that the internet isn't the future of radio; it'll be part of the ecology, but DAB will be the mainstay. The iPlayer's great, but it won't work in the car, walking around or even in the kitchen.

He concluded that it was very healthy at the moment, and he urged people to focus on things that will appeal to a wide variety of products. Add in colour screens, EPGs, PVR functionality, and WiFi.

Paul Fairburn of Smooth said that GMG weren't "rabid enthusiasts." They'd see how it went, although they saw the costs as very high. He said that they were on all the usual platforms - and indeed they may withdraw from the odd one if the costs didn't add up. But they'd be stupid to drop DAB. 8.5% of his listening comes from DAB. He talked about cars being important, but while screens might be nice, he didn't want to have to stump up to pay for additional "bits."

There were a couple of references to some "machinations" within the digital radio industry - and he wouldn't say what platforms they would come off. The emaill had gone out however...

Mark Friend at the BBC referenced a recent fall in listening off a high in 2004. He said that we can't just rely on internet or similar. He said that contrary to what some people seem to think, the BBC doesn't deliberately degrade its signal online [who's suggesting that?]. There have to be a wide choice of devices and wide choice of listening options.

Multicast and WiMax will be critical in the future, but key is the cost. The killer at the moment, he said, was analogue and digital dual cost. He asked, rhetorically, whether we should pull out of DAB as Finland did, but referred to all the sets in the market. Universality is key to the BBC and DAB is part of that.

He said that a switch off of the national networks on FM was part of a possible future and that the BBC is working with the DRWG to determine whether and when national networks might be moved across.

Ashton asked if the BBC could lead the "Freeview moment" for radio. But Friend said that it had been a unique case, and he wasn't sure what it actually meant in terms of radio.

He said that the BBC's share of digital listening was the same as analogue listening. [That's not quite true - particularly for DAB where it's more like 65% of the market compared with 57% of analogue listening. I think that commercial radio is strong in the digital realm in spite of this].

Peter Davies of Ofcom also addressed the "Freeview moment" and pointed out that there were only 600,000 ITV Digital/OnDigital devices when Freeview launched. DAB's much further down the path. He talked about new launches of digital radio internationally - and acknowledged that different tehnologies were being adopted in places like France and Germany. But these differences didn't matter, because the overall standard that had now been agreed allowed for this.

He said that the DRWG was very important with everyone sitting down at the same table. But DAB has problems structurally, with cost, and the downturn of the commercial radio market. He said that restructuring talks were ongoing and nearing a conclusion, although Channel 4 radio had obviously changed things during the process.

Ashton asked if licencing D2 was a mistake. Davies replied that it had been driven by the market, with everyone except Gcap being keen on it.

Handing back digital licences is tricky, with most analogue stations having taken 12 year rollovers. If a station hands back its digital licence they'd probably lose their analogue licence. He said it would be unfair not to enforce those rules even if lots of people did it at the same time. It'd be unfair on other stations who hadn't adopted DAB.

He said that there were probably structural issues as to where and how services were placed with national stations being carried on local muxes but that perhaps that left local muxes short of services. The picture is not quite how it might at first appear.

He was asked about the possibility of a hybrid national/local multiplex. He said that it wasn't wasy as at the moment nationally you can't offer local advertising opt outs on the national mux because it's a single frequency network. So quite how the restructure might work is not straightforward.

Darryl Pomicter of Ressen Design talked about internet radio from a prepared statement about the strengths of internet radio.

There was then something of a discussion about various numbers - particularly in relation to downloads.

There was a strongly made point from the audience about how the two real reasons for many still being in DAB is the 12 year rollover and the profits accruing from owning multiplexes.

Peter Davies refused to be drawn further, but said that stations didn't have to get into DAB when they had. It was however, argued that the picture had been different five years ago.

Nick Piggott asked about what the costs for IP radio delivery would be. Mark Friend said that he'd not looked at it in cost terms. Peter Davies said that DAB was cheaper nationally than FM, but that the problem was dual broadcasting.

Paul Fairburn said that last time he'd looked at the numbers, it was vastly more costly to reach everyone with a stream than using broadcast technology. Pomicter said that it was more a complementary medium.

Tony Moretta said that we shouldn't hold out hopes on WiMax which will need the infrastructure of mobile phone networks, and few would be investing in that kind of technology.

From the audience, Matt Degan said it was great if you had an FM licence, but hours generate cash, and of all the platforms, hours come digital radio. He said that we should look at some of the Asian services that know their markets very well to make them work.

A commenter said that if you actually look at the more niche services like 6Music, Planet Rock or even Five Live Sports Extra, the numbers at the peak were relatively small and they could use IP as a cost effective alternative.

Mark Friend said that if you didn't use DAB then even fewer would listen to it.

Bits, Bytes and Boats - Kelly Shepherd
BBC World Service Future Media

Shepherd began her presentation with a number of stats: 183m listeners and a combined 13m users per week for the website of the BBC World Service.

They decided last year that they should put audio at the heart of their redesign. This was done by creating a community to help carry out redesign. It was relaunched in December 2007 and removed many of the feeds that the previous site had been a mish mash of.

Currently they offer podcasts of 35 programmes - predominantly in English. They've had a podcast offering since 2005.

[Like Absolute] the BBC WS realises that iTunes is an important place to get podcasts.

An important part of the offering is mobile. All the sites either are, or will be available in mobile form. There is also a JAVA application for updates available in several languages.

And like other parts of the BBC they're embedding video into their sites. Arabic has already had a huge impact in the first few weeks. Persian is next up.

The language video content is now also available on YouTube in their own channels.

The audience also wants to know about the presenters and the site has individual video introductions to them all.

Shepherd said that the title of her presentation in part refers to a project based around a Bangladesh river journey looking at climate change, but using blogs, inertactive maps, Twitter and so on.

The BBC WS sites also have user generated elements. There are messageboards in a variety of language, and they even offer virtual keyboards to let people use languages in internet cafes.

There is also a "global conversation" in multi-lingual debates. People have been able to submit audio and video using services like Odeo to capture it. These elements have in turn ended up in programmes.

The BBC WS sees it as important to change as the audience changes.

Getting Intimate with the Audience

Fi Glover's chaired this session with Iain Lee (Absolute Radio), Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Dan Heaf (C4).

Iain began by getting upset (!) when Rory started using Twitter from the stage.

Fi wanted to know what the "hot ticket-est" stuff that Heaf was doing now that he couldn't have done five years ago. He said that it was using data that's now available, and what it now meant to be someone's "friend".

Rory said that it was all working, but said that he didn't think he was working. He's been blogging and putting videos on YouTube. He said that he's been Twittering like mad. He then get out a piece of paper (!) with things that people had said in response to a question that he'd earlier asked the Twitter audience.

But is it a good use of his time to "broadcast" to his thousand followers instead of talking to many millions on the Today programme.

Iain Lee said that he still thought it was worth talking to his audience online rather than using a broadcast on the radio.

Heaf thought that if you have a large audience, you should make sure that you don't give a disproportionate amount of your time to a tiny subset of your audience.

The discussion moved on to paid-for options for podcasts, with discussions around Danny Baker's podcast. Iain Lee mentioned that only Ricky Gervais had made it work although Stephen Fry was moving that way. He said that if he charged for Shindiggery then he'd only get about 10 subscriptions and they'd share it with their friends anyway.

Heaf thought that a Russell Brand podcast might do quite well just now.

Rory says that you have to be cautious with online information. He suggested that you start by disbelieving it, and then see if you can verify it. The BBC also has problems with impartiality. If someone's on Facebook should they talk about their feelings towards political figures.

Iain Lee spoke about how he's learnt his lessons about what you can and can't say on-air, and he can be looser online. He said that you can try stuff that might not work on the radio and if you fall flat on your face, then so be it. It's not "better", it's "different".

Heaf thought that there aren't enough people in the UK creating their own content and we should do more to encourage them.

Fi Glover wondered if there wasn't an element of the emperor's new clothes about it all. Do a small number of people have disproportionate impact? Cellan-Jones said that you have to be wary of that, and there are special interest groups that can try to bias you.

Asked whether it changes the way you listen, most said no. Most people listening to a phone in can't be bothered to text or email in. Lee says that he'll happily shout at an idiot like Jon Gaunt, but he won't bother phoning in.

Heaf said that, for example Twitter, was more about content discovery than what someone else had for breakfast.

UGC, says Cellan-Jones, is a long way in, with the phone-in programme on the radio being the best and most mature example. Perhaps, he thought, there'll be less one-size fits all stuff, but he wasn't sure that there'll be much more in the way of getting more stuff online.

It can be useful for chasing down case studies. But there is a fightback from some staff asking whether they should be using it all the time. Should someone's mobile phone photo be used ahead of a professional image of the same thing.

Heaf thought that the rise of on-demand media is going to change the nature of editorial and also the distribution mechanism.

Glover wondered if this was a generational thing. Most of the audience had grown up like this, but with on-demand media, younger listeners might expect things very differently. Heaf thought that while you might want live news in the morning, the daytime could be very different.

Lee thought that radio stations will be primarily radio stations. He said that Tommy Boyd was trying to set up a radio station that was all pre-recorded for self-scheduling. He said that he listens to a lot of radio on-demand, but not necessarily live. But he thought that there'll still be people who want live programmimng.

Glover wandered if Lee downloaded things he didn't like. He said that he tried stuff and would give it a chance. He talked about people who phoned up and said that they didn't like him. He asked why they listened?

In response to a question Cellan-Jones said that there was a certain crisis of confidence when people spent too much time looking at the most read items e.g. man marries goat.

Are Rory's followers ambassadors to his audience? Definitely. He said he uses at a sounding board and a resource. But it is a promotional mechanism. He'll advertise forthcoming stories and get instant feedback when they air. But it's "dangerously seductive."

Glover wondered about the time constraints on him. He said that it is very time consuming - he spent a lot of the weekend on this.

A respondent wondered about Fi's own stuff - with Facebook profiles and blogs for Saturday Live. Glover said that they'd responded to a specific need. The blog has been less successful but Facebook has worked really well some of it down to the nature of the programme and to "feel the love when we weren't on air."

A question from the audience asked about reaching hard-to-reach audiences using these technologies. Heaf thought that some of these tools offered the single most useful mechanism to allow feedback, but are these organisations listening and engaging.

There was something of a discussion about the Brand/Ross affair, and the difficulty in responding to it, and the level of what would be appropriate.

- Lunch -

Death by a Thousand Cuts: More Choice = More Noise

Nick Wallis chaired this session about personlised music, with representatives of the BBC, Sony (not SonyBMG any longer) We7 and last.fm.

Jonoas Woost of last.fm which, of course, is all about personalisation. He explained how last.fm works and scrobbles your music to determine what you might want to listen to.

Frederico Bolza of Sony has a job discovering how to stay relevant in the new world. He said that his job was to find artists and then to get the music to them. Last.fm, We7 and the radio are all channels for them to get their music out to listeners.

He said that 90% of their revenue comes from the sale of recorded music with most of the remainder coming via PPL from radio. These new areas don't yet pay very much.

"Choice doesn't necessarily help you find things." Discovery is important. Without it, you're left with infinite choice you have no choice..

Steve Purdham of We7, which launches tomorrow, said that it can be like a needle in a haystack. He said that having found something in particular, people then get lazy and want to go back to the radio model. So you get into the recommendation phase via either friends, automated systems or radio producers. He said that We7 were trying to harness those choices. He said that he had to offer something that was better than the pirate options.

When asked how it was better than last.fm, Purdham said that it was a different model. It was up to the consumer to determine what the preferred model of consuming music would be.

Woost said that there were still lots of different methods of delivering music.

We7 works on an audio advertising basis, whereas Joost relies on display advertising. Both sites sell music too via third parties or otherwise.

Chris Kimber of the BBCpointed out that most people still find out about new music via the linear radio. "John Peel was a filter," as is Zane Lowe. It's how to filter this music perhaps using useful web apps. He said that the BBC wanted to be able to tell you more about what you've just heard on air. Until now, you've had to go hunting around the web, and he saw that as crazy. Similarly, if you discover someone online, what programmes should the consumer listen to in order to hear more?

Kimber's worried about staying ahead of the curve. He felt that they've fallen behind it to some extent - there's no personalisation currently.

The currency is still the artist said Bolzo; that's the starting point. The band is the brand. "Don't wait as long as we did" - he said that Sony was slow. He said that the old model was broken - and the bigger part of the challenge now was the mindset and how it can work. Technology wasn't the real problem. He said until now, it's still easier to do the usual radio plugging. Bolzo sees all these technologies as complementary. He'd love the ability to press a button to feed back what the audience thought of a track.

Kimber said that the Now Playing info was easy if you're limited to 300 tracks played on hard disk. 57% of Radio 3 output is non-standard CDs, so without employing people to type in details live, it can be hard to provide up to date information all the time.

Purdham said that radio has to get onto the conveyer belt sooner rather than later. You should be able to get more information about any track you hear online or on the radio immediately. Technology allows us to do that now he said.

Purdham: "We've been doing this for 18 months and we have no idea how we're going to make money out of it."

He said that we don't yet know how large the pie is.

Wallis wanted to know how radio stations were going to get a cut of it. He wondered if Apple hadn't already walked away with it. Purdham said that in some cases it could be easy, but that didn't work on the tube.

Woost wasn't sure what the battle actually was. What pie is commercial radio wanting a slice of he wondered. Where is the Zane Lowe of commercial radio, he wanted to know. He said commercial radio had to take risks.

"I don't trust a single commercial radio station in this country," he said.

Bolza pointed out that the last.fm application was one of the most successful applications on the iPhone.

Kimber pointed out that there was no point to the BBC doing a last.fm type thing. "Zane Lowe is going to give you something that the wisdom of the crowds isn't."

He thought that there was a big opportunity here for doing something more mainstream. Most music discovery services are still quite "geeky." The BBC would be targeting that mainstream.

Wallis wanted to know about futurology. What was going to happen to that great live moment when you know that 4m are listening. Kimber thought not - we'd have both. There are still going to be times when you just want to put the radio on. And there's the boredom aspect that means on demand services don't offer - serendipity.

In the future listeners will listen to on demand and live services thought Kimber. He also said that programmes will have to be broken up so that someone can get, say, everything about the Killers.

Purdham says that they have to chase the fans' desires and "feed" people as they want to be. Technology will make this easier. It all comes back to the consumer he thought.

Wallis wondered how music might suffer from all this as a result. Are all bands going to sound the same - losing regional identities. Bolza said that you can't hold it back. He said that record companies have to work harder and be more attentive. A fan's attention has to be earned and deserved. Fans will go wherever the hell they want.

Woost saw more of the same in the future as they're a media company. At the moment, their audience is still quite geeky but is changing. Amazon is mainstream and that's what they need to be. But the social context of last.fm is important.

There was a question from the audience about the use of the data. Everyone was concerned about privacy issues.

Another questioner wondered about competition from mobile operators such as Nokia's Comes With Music initiative. Perhaps it'll compete with us, thought Woost, but he wasn't too worried seemingly. The audience can already get it free. Kimber thought that 1m tracks on a mobile phone was scary. Bolza said that it was to do with the editorial controls and filters.

Matt Wells at The Guardian wanted to know about the BBC's personalisation plans. Kimber said that it was about using experts in their fields to provide recommendations. He said that he didn't see the option to listen to specific tracks on demand being on the BBC's roadmap. He said that it wasn't about the BBC offering that track. Purdham pointed out that the links could come out of the BBC elsewhere.

Visualising Radio - John Ousby of the BBC and Robin Pembroke of Global

John Ousby began by presenting something that was remarkably similar to a presentation I saw him give at The Digital Radio Show last week.

But it's a good presentation with demonstrations of TV, online and radio visualisations. He demonstrated a recent experiement the BBC recently had with Scott Mills being webcast from his flat.

He also ran through various other experiments with different BBC networks including Adam and Joe on 6 Music and Radio 4 as well as user generated animations.

He then did a live demo of Radio 1's Band in Your Hand. And it worked - well worth trying yourself if you have a Windows PC and a webcam.

Ousby reminded us of the Lobster - a mobile that was available via Virgin Mobile that for a while allowed you to listen to radio (and watch TV - but few did) on a mobile using DAB.

He talked about the opportunities from Slideshow on DAB devices, as well as what's available on DTT and cable.

Finally he showed us a possible way of pulling in and displaying a variety of information on appropriate platforms.

Then we moved onto Robin Pembrooke's presentation - he trailed an exciting new iPhone application that we'd have to wait to see.

At a tough time for commercial radio, Pembrooke thought that some of the ideas that visualisation brings could be a "game changer."

The key information is still what's playing. He said that the last 10 played tracks on Heart's website accounted for 40% of traffic. "That might say more about Heart's website."

He highlighted some research that shows that audio and the web work well improving clickthroughs. And of course commercial radio is able to monetise those clickthroughs.

But of course commercial radio doesn't have the resources of the BBC. It can be labour intensive (although he pointed out that Chill's data was excellent), but the can also be bandwidth intensive. And it can make things more memorable than we might wish (we saw a still from YouTube of Brand/Ross).

And of course, users don't always want to see everything visualised.

He pointed out that mobile streaming isn't scalable and that it kills battery life. He hopes that DAB will be paired in a slightly more elegant way than currently.

The Pure Evoke - I didn't win one in the draw - is mentioned and the congratulated.

"Black and yellow is a step forward."

But it's still a clunky interface.

"Audience = £" read a big slide.

Pembroke then move onto his new iPhone App. Previously they'd been the first to offer streaming, and now offered additional functionality with now playing, news etc and commercial opportunities.

It looks quite smart and allows tagging to come back to the information at a later date. This allows them to buy the track via information and allow commercial opportunities to link through to advertisers' websites.

Overall commercial radio can't afford the "specials" but there are options for visualisation.

The Chief TwiT Speaks - Leo Laporte

Possibly the most technically challenging thing ever attempted at a Radio Academy event was the session with Leo Laporte session via Skype. Needless to say, all wasn't smooth immediately, but eventually we got online.

Leo began by letting us know who he is and where he comes from.

TwiT reaches 175,000 - 250,000 downloads a week by unique IP addresses. He mentioned the various other shows he produces. Co-hosts get paid and then there's advertising co-op money. In total 470k a month in reach in the US and 50 hours a month.

He said that the advertising was all US only. Although the companies are usually global, they're not able to monetise a third of t he audience as it's outside the US.

Then he spoke about the video service he's launched. They've got as high as 10,000 simultaneous people watching live. Last night's TwiT was 5,000.

He said that it's all relatively cheap with the bandwidth being the most expensive with various dedicated lines for them.

The downloads are the hardest part with 4-5TB of data downloaded a day, but nearly all the revenue would go towards this if they weren't able to do deals. That could be as much as $40,000 a month otherwise.

So far, Laporte says that advertisers are fairly conservative. At first they charged around $35 cpm but it's now closer to $70 cpm. This is big premium over radio which is at around $5-10 cpm (cpt).

Although the prices are high, they're maintaining good usage. They're now earning between $500 and $15,000 an episode in revenues. They know that a downturn is coming. But they know that they're reaching the right audience. And with costs so low, they can continue on, and by the time advertisers are back, audiences will have grown and they'll be in a good place.

He sees NPR as some of the biggest competition at this point. He sees more mainstream media coming into the market. As a result he sees smaller players falling by the wayside.

Asked about how the video is able to make money - Laporte replied that it had grown audiences by about 10%. He said that it also increased the engagement of that audience.

"Our audience take pride [in taking down] any site we mention."

He says that so far they've not charged extra for video. But they've tried product placement. He gave the example of an energy drink which they drank on the show. They've also tried selling clothing.

He pointed out that he has explain the metrics to a lot of advertisers and education is important.

Asked about whether he'd give up his regular radio gig, he said that he wasn't going to give it up as it allowed cross-promotion, and in any case was his primary source of income.

When asked whether or not it would work in other subject areas with non-tech areas, he thought they could. It was all about providing content that was otherwise unavialble.

Finally, when asked about the future of radio in the US, it was clear that it probably isn't HD. He says when asked this by radio executives he gets out his iPhone and demos one of the apps on it from radio operators.

Newspapers are a real challenge; radio less so.

He sees radio over IP as offering a challenge to terrestrial. It won't necessarily takeover. Radio has to create a community, and that's more than request lines and phone-ins.

Overall, it's a competitive challenge and radio could come out better in the end.

Collings and Herrin

I'm not sure it's worth me blogging this, as it's obviously going to be a podcast (as is much of the rest of the day). So I'll leave it there. A very good day. And Ben's asked me to say that his session was best. Where's my fiver?

This is a kind of "sister" post to something James Cridland wrote earlier this week on his blog. He was talking about the email that my employer is currently sending out to people who are still using our old virginradio.co.uk domain.

But of course he's only seeing half the story. At work, our IT department has set up the mail system to email us everytime we get an email (and shh, don't tell anyone, but we do actually get copies of the emails even though the bounced mail tells us we don't - it just persuades individuals to update their contacts and start using the correct email address).

In fact, I find those additional emails a little annoying, so don't tell our IT department but I wrote a couple of rules. One to move them out of my Inbox, and another to instead flag emails being sent to the old domain.

But this takes me to the crux of this blog entry. The bulk of the emails that are still being sent to the old domain are automated mailing lists and newsletters. Those bounce-back emails are disappearing into a black hole, and it's up to me to update the lists that I want to carry on receiving mail from.

This should be easy, but of course, it's ridiculously hard. Some email doesn't have any update or unsubscribe options at all. More commonly, there's just an unsubscribe option. That means that I probably have to re-register, which is, of course, time consuming, and also makes it very easy for me to not bother at all - something that most of these companies would rather didn't happen.

Then there are the companies that require you to remember what password you used when you set up an "account" simply for the purpose of registering for their newsletter. If you're lucky, they have a "forgotten your password" option. And if you're really lucky, you'll actually get an email back from them with either a reminder or a reset option within the same hour. Top-tip - make sure these services send out email instantly, otherwise you might lose me as a customer altogether.

Some of these emails come from trade publishers who offer a wealth of newsletters for a variety of magazines. It's far easier if I can make one change that affects their entire portfolio rather than lots of separate changes. Ironically, many of these magazines cover marketing, yet their list management software is poor.

Google Alerts are actually more annoying than they should be. I have a number of alerts (including the obligatory vanity alert) that are sent to my Gmail account. But I also have a set of work-related searches that I have to adminster "outside" the environs of Google because there seems to be a single email address for all. Perhaps their recent RSS feed option for these searches is the way to go? My only solution is to delete all the current alerts and re-create them with my new email address, ensuring I'm logged out of Google at the time.

Changing addresses is never easy at the best of times. The Royal Mail has a forwarding service for you to use for snail mail - but that's not always possible if you move jobs or ISPs. So given that we're all going to want to change our details from time to time, there's really no excuse for making it hard for the user to administer.

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with Geode - a Firefox plugin that allows your browser to use geolocation technology to determine whereabouts you are.

When you reach a Geode compatable site, a bar at the top of the browser asks you how much information you want to pass to the requesting site - Exact, Neighbourhood, City, Nothing.

When I tested it, I decided it could have my exact location. Now I was trying this using a WiFi laptop sitting at home. A Google map appeared and I was shocked to discover that it had my location within perhaps 10 metres.

My laptop has no GPS to position me, and it isn't connected to a cell-network for triangulation via cell towers. So how did it locate me?

Geode currently uses Skyhook who essentially maintain a database using GPS, cell tower locations and, importantly, a reference list of WiFi websites that are geocoded.

Mine is not the only wireless network in the flats where I live. I can see eight or ten other networks to one extent or another. And my neighbours are technical enough to have security enabled their networks (I discovered this when I was between routers and tried to find someone to leach from before my replacement router arrived). It's entirely possible that someone else's router is registered to Skyhook.

I assume that this is how my location was determined. I have a fixed IP Address and my ISP does know where I live, but it doesn't know whether or not I have WiFi, so I don't think that there's any data it could be selling on about me. In any case, if I beef up my WiFi security to the maximum, there's no way to discover my IP Address simply by sniffing my router.

But I would like to know for certain that one of my neighbours has registered their router, and my location is not somehow coming from my own router. While I'm sure that Skyhook's privacy is strict, I like to be in charge of my own data.

I was thinking about that when I was looking into another technology - satnavs. At the weekend, Something For The Weekend, the Tim Lovejoy vehicle, had their regular gadget review. A lady came on to demonstrate a couple of new pieces of technology. One was a TomTom satnav that included the usual mapping and traffic information, as well as things like local petrol prices.

Lovejoy asked a very fair question: how did the satnav know the prices? "From the satellites" came the answer. He tried again: he understood how the device knew where it was, but where was the petrol price information coming from. Satellites was again the answer. Eventually he gave up and moved on.

It was a fair question, because of couse, the only information coming from GPS satellites is location information - or more to the point, information about the satellites' positions to allow the device to triangulate its position on Earth. GPS satellites do not transmit UK petrol prices.

So how was it getting its info? Many devices have traffic information - usually provided by Trafficmaster. This is broadcast in the UK using RDS TMC technology on the FM network. Classic FM, the only national commercial FM operator carries the data and so as long as your satnav can receive Classic FM, it can pull that data down and use it to plot alternative routes etc. A separate system

But that's not how TomTom is getting either its traffic info, or its petrol price info. The petrol price info actually has to be downloaded via your home PC. I guess you just plug your device in regularly to keep it up to date. You're not storing your satnav in your glove compartment are you? TomTom buys the data from a third-party company.

But it's their HD Traffic I'm more interested in. Devices with this technology have SIM cards fitted, and we're told that the system uses 16.7m anonymous mobile phones. By capturing location detail from these phones, the system is able to monitor traffic flow - and you can be sure that these devices also contribute to that information. TomTom is, of course, keen to point out that this is an anonymous service, and you can't be tracked with it (there are mobile phone tracking services out there elsewhere mind you).

But given that the technology is fairly new, whose 16.7m phones is it using, and do the owners of those phones know?

The initial Dutch data utilised the Vodafone network, and it's that network that's also being used in the UK.

So if you're a Vodafone subscriber, did you know that Vodafone is monetising the data they collect about your location? To be clear, that's essentially data about which mast or masts your phone can see when it pings them. I'm sure that buried away in the terms and conditions you signed when you took our your contract, you agreed to let them use said data. But I feel uncomfortable about this.

Far too much has been written about Kerry Katona and her behaviour on This Morning a couple of days ago. I can't be bothered to go into it, and if she is ill, I'm not about to link to YouTube clips of her being ill on national television. That's despite whatever I might think about someone who lives their life in Heat and Zoo magazines. If you feel that your interviewee is not fully with it, curtail the interview and either go to a pre-recorded piece or a commercial break. Don't dwell on it.

But I think some of the post-rationalisation has been interesting. First of all we had Philip Schofield defending himself and ITV on Chris Moyles because she'd actually arrived at the studio really late.

I don't doubt that Schofield is an honourable man, but I find ITV claiming to care about Katona's welfare somewhat questionable when my weekly ITV.com email dropped in my inbox today:

"Watch Kerry Katona on This Morning..." said the subject line.

"Watch Kerry's dramatic interview.

"Kerry Katona caused a stir on This Morning this week.

"Did you see the controversial interview? Watch it and see what all the fuss was about."

For which read: it's not fair that YouTube gets all the traffic. We want some of that action.

That's clearly the most important thing happening on ITV this week, because it's the only headline story on the email.

I expect that even now, executives are eagerly poring over their analytic programs seeing what kind of uplift the Katona footage has had.

We made a video for work the other day at Abbey Road studios. I thought I'd share it here too:

There really are some poor Google Ads kicking about at the moment, and the worst of them seem to be appearing in Gmail (for me at least).

Here's the latest example of something that's thoroughly misrepresentative on many levels.

"Eastenders is Axed"? No it's not. The link is to a strange site called "just-the-issues.com/eastenders".

If you click through you're presented with the following:

Seemingly this is a "BBC Poll" - which I suppose could mean that it's some research commissioned by the BBC (Obviously it's not), or their get-out might be that it's a poll about a BBC programme.

It's strange that someone not connected to the BBC is paying Google to get some response their question of the day. Still, that's what advertising's there for, and if I want to find out the answer to something via research, I'm likely to need to pay someone to get me the answer.

Curiously, the links to both "Yes" and "No" in their "poll" are identical. Hmm.

Clicking through takes you to a random "shopping" site. Goodness knows how I'm supposed to win one their 23 "prizes".

In other words the whole thing is just a traffic driver, and a not very good one at that. Yet Google lets this sort of thing through. I just think that as Google and other online advertisers become bigger, this kind of non-advertising causes me to lose trust in Google as a brand. The top of my email is prime real estate, and it feels like the centre-break of the News at Ten has some kind of Dellboy advertising. It wouldn't happen on ITV, and shouldn't happen on Google.

No doubt if I go through the frustratingly hidden process of reporting the advertiser to Google, I'll eventually get the ad pulled, but since Google makes that hard, I wonder how interested it really is. Yet it should care, and I shouldn't see garbage like this.

Gmail's spam filter works pretty well, but then I get served spam as advertising!

Radio Pop was something I first saw at last year's Radio At The Edge conference.

It describes itself as "social radio listening." Once logged in (and it uses Open ID - which might be good if it was ever made clear to the broader public how it should be used), you start listening to a BBC radio channel and the system logs your listening by network and by show and you get presented with a nice set of charts.

Then you add a few friends, and you can see what they're listening too as well.

Future iterations will include tracks so that you can actually specify pieces of music and highlight them for your friends. Strangely, I think the delay in the implementation of that is less to do with technology than some quaint internal rules.

As well as monitoring your own listening and that of your friends, you can also see what everyone across the system is listening too.

I can get a nice badge for my blog, but because I'm trying to keep things clean, I'm going to just put it in here.

I've just been listening to a very strange jazz rendition of Bowie's 'Life On Mars' on Late Junction (the new schedule for The Geoff Show means that I won't have to choose between these two now). Robert Sandall's presenting a rather fabulous programme of cover versions. Sandall was a co-presenter of Mixing It, once broadcast on Radio 3, but now to be found under the guise of Where's The Skill In That on Resonance FM. Because I liked it a lot, I gave it a "Pop".

The "Pop" records the date and time so that, iPlayer willing, I can go and listen to what my friend enjoyed so much about the show.

The charting is exceptionally fine and it all looks wonderful.

At the moment, the player is a little basic, and because it can only monitor listening via its own player rather than the BBC's rather more fully functional player, there's no opportunity to measure on-demand listening. That's particularly a shame because that's how I listen to most of my BBC radio online.

I suppose the only other problem is that I have to keep making my friends over and over everytime I sign up for something. Once for Facebook, again for Flickr, then again for Twitter, Pounce, YouTube etc. While I might want to keep my "professional" Linked In colleagues well clear of my Facebook profile (I've got nothing to hide - honest), for the most part I just want to maintain one list of friends. But that's a separate issue.

Still it's a fine development worth watching. I seem to remember that when it was presented at the conference last year, there was talk of other - commercial - stations being able to get involved. The fact that the URL sits apart from the BBC makes it interesting. Maybe it's something that Absolute Radio could get involved in?

You may notice that it all looks a bit different around here. On the otherhand, you may well be reading a feed in which - hopefully - nothing's changed.

The look and feel of this blog has basically been unchanged for nearly six years. So with great trepidation I've finally completed an overhaul started nearly a year ago. If you don't like the header image, then holdfire, there'll be another one along in a minute - 25 to choose from!

I suspect that all sorts of things are broken, so do feel free to let me know if something's not working, or if some kind of feature doesn't work properly on Safari or whatever (like I'd care).

Here's hoping commenting works, otherwise it could be a little silent.

We all know that internet advertising is booming, and much of that growth is coming from "search" - that is, advertising that you see dependent on your search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN or wherever. But to what extent should the advertisers be checked out by Google and its ilk before that advertising goes live?

I ask this because I've seen some "interesting" ads recently on Google services. A recent search via Google Shopping for a particular model of camera threw up one online store that offered a suspciously cheap camera. I searched around, but couldn't easily find a contact at Google Shopping to report the dodgy site to. The service is automated and Google explicitly explains that you can't get a position on the service via payment. Fair enough, although it'd be nice to at least get a human to check out suspicious sites.

Then this morning I saw this sponsored link in my Gmail:

Photoshop CS3 for £29 sounds just a little suspicious. Amazon charges £500 for the same product!

I decided against spending £29 in pursuit of my investigation. I suspect that they're either selling trials that can otherwise be downloaded free from Adobe's site, or cracked versions of the software.

Is it fair for me to ask whether or not Google should be at least running cursory checks on their advertising? Such is teh size of the market, that it would be expensive, but should they still do it? Expense or not, Google has a reputation to maintain, and being used to advertise pirated software is not smart. I work in commercial radio, and as far as I know we've never run an advertisement for an illegal product. Indeed in radio and television, there are services to check through adverts to see that they adhere to all the rules of the land and aren't liable to offend or distort the truth. We also credit check new advertisers when they come on board to ensure that they'll be able to pay for advertising, although this is largely because we charge in arrears and want to make sure they don't run off without paying. Google usually takes money up front but I've got to tell you that finding the right place to complain was not easy.

Eventually, after quite a bit of searching, I came to this well-hidden page and submitted a complaint. It'll be interesting to learn if they follow up my complaint, although difficult to prove either way since it may be unlikely that I see another ad from them anyway. I also contacted Adobe.

It's important that complaints about advertising are taken seriously by the likes of Google. If I distrust ads that I see served, then that's counter to my belief in the whole medium as a place to advertise. I'm sure Google will take my complaint seriously and stop this infringer. But the process should really be simpler, and even if Google has to employ more people to check the veracity of some of its copy then that's a small price to pay.

Earlier today, someone on an email group I'm in asked if everyone was having trouble with a specific site or whether it was just him. Quick as a flash he was directed to downforeveryoneorjustme.com which does exactly what it says on the proverbial tin.

So when I came to look at Flickr a few minutes ago, I wondered if I'd immediately get a chance to try it out. But the site was working yet not all the images were showing - indeed I was seeing hardly any of them.

Twitter to the rescue! Search Twitter for Flickr (they bought Summize yesterday!) and hey presto:

has the flickr database gone down??!!??!?!???!?!?!
Flickr is down
what's wrong with flickr? farm4 blocked?
What's up w flickr? I can't view any image that isn't already in my browser cache. Something down @ yahoo? Bah.
and flickr appears to be somewhat hosed.
anyone noticed any problems with flickr today?
Flickr is being very naughty right now.

And so on.

So I guess it's broken, or at least farm4 is.

Orange has announced its LiveRadio - effectively an Orange branded Wi-Fi radio. You pair it up with your wireless router and away you go listening to internet radio from around the globe.

So far, so normal. You can buy a cheaper device elsewhere. But the Orange LiveRadio does allow you to purchase music from the Orange music store (I assume music that's played on specific Orange music streams). And the inclusion of downloading podcasts to the radio is nice.

But £99.99 is too high. Seemingly Orange has sold 10,000 of these devices in France (where at 129 Euros at the current exchange rate, the price is actually slightly higher than it is in the UK!), so perhaps it'll do well, but I think these things need to come down to less than fifty quid before they really hit the mainstream.

I do however note that very nearly the first thing you read on the LiveRadio purchase page is a note to say that the radio is unsuitable for people who have a 2 GB cap on their monthly downloads. And it further tells customers that they should switch off their radio when it's not in use to prevent consumers contravening fair usage policies.

Who would have a 2 GB cap on their downloads? Well, if you're on a free Orange broadband package, you might. Orange's basic plan these days has a 6 GB cap on it, but that's a paid-for plan. When they originally offered free broadband to their mobile customers, there was a 2 GB cap.

And I find it plainly bizarre that something using as little bandwidth as internet radio could leave me liable to contravene any ISP's fair usage policies. I'm a heavy radio listener, and playing around with a 32k mp3 stream of Virgin Radio in Winamp, I can see that I'd be using 14 MB an hour. So listening at work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for a 4 week month would result in me using 2.2GB a month. And if I upped that to the 128k stream (8.9 GB a month on the same basis), I can see that I'd be in serious trouble if I was even on Orange broadband's most basic paid-for service...

ITV is dipping its toe in the iTunes water by making available some of its back catalogue on the iTunes television store.

This is no bad thing, but I think that it does again highlight some of the issues that dealing with Apple can introduce. Despite some of the series being over forty years old (The Saint - series 4), the price of each episode is fixed at £1.89. That's just too much.

Last year the Daily Mail actually gave away the whole of Brideshead Revisited, so charging £1.89 an episode feels steep. Certainly there are savings to made by buying the whole series, but at &17.99 its still a couple of quid more than the boxed set on Amazon. The DVDs, of course, work in many more places than in iTunes and on an iPod. They're also in higher resolution, and come with various extras all of which are lacking from the iTunes store version.

Now I don't want to poo-poo this venture, as it's genuinely a good idea to get these programmes out into as many places as possible. But it's quite telling that no current programmes are being made available. The most up to date show that has been released so far (and to be fair, today's day one) is Lewis - series 1, obviously. Wouldn't want to let series 2 out of the gate just yet.

I think the problem really still lies with iTunes insisting on a fixed price for a programme, be it a brand new one hour drama or a decades old half hour comedy. Retailers should be able to adjust their prices as bricks and mortar retailers do. It may be that you can sell this week's Headbangers for 49p, but Foyles War should cost £3.50.

It's undoubtedly an experiment, and ITV is to be applauded. But what we're all waiting for is Kangaroo - the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 service that Ashley Highfield is leaving the BBC to run. Kangaroo is going to try to effectively be a commercial version of the iPlayer. While details remain unclear, I'd expect both paid and ad-funded models to be tested. Video DRM is always going to be more of an issue, but even if all the service does is put everyone's programming in one place and playable with one piece of software, then it's got to be better than the piecemeal channel by channel approach that's taken place so far.

Of course a cynic might wonder whether Kangaroo is the reason that only archive programming is being made available to iTunes at the moment. If I can buy Foyles War on iTunes for one price, and on Kangaroo at another price, then there's true competition. But ITV doesn't want the service it owns part of to be undercut by someone else. Nor does it want Apple to run away with a nascent market before it's had a go itself - that's something the music industry has come to regret on an enormous scale.

By the way, if all this talk of Brideshead Revisited makes you want to watch the series again, there's a free route: ITV.com has the whole series available to stream on demand. It tends to only work with Windows and using Internet Explorer, and it's ad-funded. But there it is, free of charge.

In fact ITV.com has a great deal of classic drama, comedy and kids programming available to stream including Press Gang, The Jewel in the Crown, Rising Damp, Cracker, Morse, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Prime Suspect and much more. The interface is clunky, and it's hard to work out what's there, but they've got a great deal.

So what are we to make of the new look BBC News homepage that launched this morning?

It's quite possibly my single most visited site - even more so than the Google homepage since I search from within my toolbar - so I guess it's always quite a significant change to me when the BBC update it.

I like the use of screen real estate. You tend to find with every website update that the pages get wider and wider as the average user's screensize increases. But I'd like to think that the space would be used a little more fully.

The top "BBC bar" has a search box and low graphics/accessibility, and that's it. There's vast space being wasted, and I find it especially wasteful since it used to contain links to radio and TV directly from that bar. The BBC recently revamped their overall homepage, but I never actually visited that. The news page is my default homepage and I expect to be able to get to the major parts of the BBC's website from it. Indeed a consistent set of tabs along the top is just useful anyway.

I really miss these.

A lot.

The "BBC News bar" is also full of wasteful space. It contains a single link to the live BBC news feed (e.g. News 24, or Breakfast News) and that's it. So there are two "wasted" blocks which could contain useful info/links or just reduce the amount of scrolling that you need to do. "Above the fold" is incredibly valuable real estate in newspaper parlance, and it should be on websites too.

The comments to the BBC Editor's blog highlight that links to Weather are missing. By mid-morning, a link had been restored but like Sport, the link is under "Related BBC sites" which feels very poor.

I'd like to see "full" links to both sport and weather from the main tabs. Sports news is news after all. It's part of the on-air news programmes and bulletins, so it feels a little as though the news website is disowning it even though sport does seem to warrant three headlines on the right. And what news bulletin doesn't also include a weather update?

Overall, the front page is a lot more spaced out, but the extra real estate hasn't been used to provide any more stories or links. Indeed with links removed, it feels that there are actually fewer things to do.

It may be that this is a work in progress and more "bits" will emerge over time - I certainly hope so.

As a follow-up to RAJAR's recent research into podcasting, the US based eMarketer.com has just released some forecasts for podcast revenues for the next five years.

The full report retails for $695, so you'll excuse me if I limit my notes to the findings they publish on their blog.

They suggest that total audience for podcasts in the US in 2007 was 18.5m. RAJAR had a UK figure of 4.3m. So the US listenership is 4.3 times the UK one. Considering that the population of the US is roughly 5 times that of the UK, this seems quite reasonable - particularly as the UK has faster internet access than the US.

When the active audience is examined - those who've downloaded a podcast in the last week - the figures are 6.5m in the US and 1.9m in the UK; a factor of 3.4 times the size in the US. Again, I find this broadly believable.

What RAJAR hasn't (and wouldn't) been able to provide, is the value of podcasting market. eMarketer considers "advertising" to include sponsorship. I assume that also includes podcasts made to order for clients. The 2007 value is $165m which if we extrapolate, would equate to $38-50m for the UK market (using the multiples above) - or £19-25m.

Is this right? I don't know, although I suspect that the proliferation of BBC programmes available as podcasts might suggest this is a bit high, albeit that these same podcasts are available to US consumers as well.

The report also predicts some significant growth in the next five years, with revenues rising to $435m by 2012, representing an increase of 264%. Let's hope so!

Finally, they list some of the factors they believe are driving growth:

A number of factors are driving the growth of the podcast-user base:

• Greater ease of consumption for podcast content
  
• Growing awareness of podcasting
  
• Terrestrial radio’s use and promotion of podcasting
  
• Increased penetration of portable players
  
• The evolution of smart phones and proliferation of affordable mobile data plans

I wouldn't disagree with any of those areas. What closer analysis of RAJAR's research has made me consider is that for a lot of people, getting podcasts onto their portable devices is still actually quite tricky. They don't understand what "subscribe" means, and beyond the iPod and iTunes, there's not a user-friendly system for the non-tech minded consumer to use.

As a result, many people now have mobile phones that are perfectly capable of playing back podcasts, but they're not using them.

RAJAR's research told us that more people play back their podcasts on their PC than anywhere else, and while a PC will always be convenient for many, I believe that this is more because consumers don't know how to get podcasts onto their portable devices.

To continue growing the uptake of podcasts, radio stations and others have to provide clear explanations of how subscriptions work, and methods for getting podcasts regularly updated and onto their listeners' devices as easily and painlessly as possible. Only then will podcasting become truly mainstream.

*As ever, these views are mine, and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer, Virgin Radio.

If you're going to produce a print CSS file for your blog entries (nicely formatting a print version, and removing unnecessary page furniture), please include the comments!

The two guiltiest candidates that I've come across - i.e. blogs that I read but don't conform - are the BBC's, and those of Guardian Unlimited. If you try to print the entry out, you'll only get the initial authored piece, and none of the comments below. Yet as often as not, the blog is positively inviting comments, and part of the raison d'etre of having a blog is to allow commenting. Comments very often drive the conversation forward, and are often as important as the original entry.

But I'm not able to print those comments out! Try as I might, short of using a really old browser that ignores CSS code, I'm left to copy and paste comments into a word processor and print from there. I can't tell you how frustrating that is. if someone knows how to disable CSS in Firefox that'd at least be a workaround, but personally I consider it poor design that I can't print comments.

Obviously I know that I shouldn't be killing more trees than need be by unnecessarily printing things out, but the average blog entry and associated comments makes for a far better read than the dreadful free "newspapers" handed out by London tube stations for the commute home.

"Pandora's ex-customers in the UK will be wondering why the service they want can't be catered for by the recording industry. And they are not alone - for what are the millions of illicit peer-to-peer file-sharers, but a huge potential market? Internet users are showing the industry how they want their music in the digital age."

From the New Statesman

This week EMI makes between 1500 and 2000 employees redundant.

Is there a link? Discuss.

Last night the Radio Academy held an event in London to talk about podcasting. It was interesting to a point, although whether or not we learnt a great deal, I'm not so sure.

You can listen to a podcast of the event at the Radio Academy's website (I'm pretty sure registration isn't required).

Some points we heard:

• A nice lady from the BBC did blurt out a few stats from an upcoming RAJAR podcast survey that are currently confidential - look out for them at the end of the month.
• Matt Wells at The Guardian is awfully annoyed that the BBC has so many podcasts - something like 150, especially considering that some of them have some very low take-up.
• Matt Wells also doesn't consider what he does as being "radio" - others dissented.
• There is money to be made, but advertising agencies are slow in believing in podcasts, and perhaps the more immediate cash comes from podcasts made for clients.
• Some were annoyed that video was considered more.

There was more, but as I say, I didn't come away thinking wow! I did have a short list of new podcasts to try however.

I'd disagree with some of Matt Wells was saying though. To be honest, even working in a commercial radio environment, I wouldn't be too fussed if Radio 4 podcast their entire output. As long as it didn't take a producer/editor too long to chop put the audio together (and much Radio 4 output is delivered as a final 30 minute piece of audio anyway), then there's simply no harm in making it available as a podcast however low the take-up is. If there's one thing that we've learnt from podcasting, it's that quite esoteric subjects can support podcasts because of the global nature of the available listenership.

And while I wouldn't want to get too hung up about the terminology - of course podcasts are "radio." I think we just need to redefine what we believe "radio" means. Once upon a time, it was a live broadcast, with just about everything being done there and then - so no recorded music, just relays of live concerts, live plays and the news read live. Then it became lots of pre-recorded music interspersed with live DJs and live(ish) news. These days, I can Listen Again or download programmes as well.

It stands to reason that the most technically adept podcasts are made by people who've been groomed in radio production techniques, and that includes Matt Wells' own podcasts. One commenter said that we're not fully making use of the medium, and too many podcasts sound like traditional radio programmes. That may be so, but it's because having a structure to what I listen to is no bad thing. There truly is nothing to stop someone with a laptop and a microphone making a podcast, but like television and film, there is a certain language or grammar (in television they'd include cutaways, close-ups, reaction shots, establishing shots) that guide us into the story. If I'm listening to music, it's really useful if someone can somehow tell me what I've been hearing. And at the start of a spoken word podcast, some idea of what they've got coming up is useful.

What I'd like to have heard more about is the inclusion of music in podcasts. Deals have been struck to allow thirty second clips of music into podcasts produced by either the BBC or commercial radio. But these deals are temporary, and only account for rebroadcasts of previously produced radio material. What about original shows? There are plenty of podcasts that use music of course, but the reality is that either they're not paying rights for those tracks, or they're using unsigned bands or having to deals with the composers/performers themselves. I don't see anything happening in a rush - particularly given the recent experiences of Pandora.

And how long should a podcast be? Many of the panel spoke about the freedom they had, not needing to fit into a 30 minute slot. It's certainly true that there's nothing more annoying than listening to an interviewee on the Today Programme only for them to get cut-off just as they're getting interesting due to time constraints. But editorial controls still need to be applied - I don't necessarily want to hear an hour and half of meandering. I find podcasts of over an hour "intimidating" when I see them in iTunes, while others at just three or four minutes could be longer.

Video is interesting. Yes, you can watch videos on your iPod or in iTunes. But there are different standards for different devices, and while I can listen to mp3s in my mobile phone, enhanced podcasts won't work. Video podcasts probably aren't "radio" because you have to watch as well as listen (obviously!). But then we're living in a world where there isn't any longer a clean delineation between different media types. The same device that lets me listen to TWIT lets me watch Mahalo Daily, so are they the same or is one radio and one TV? Yesterday Apple relaunched Apple TV - a device that does let me watch video podcasts on my TV. So maybe it is TV after all?

Still, all said and done, more has to be done to make podcasting mainstream. It's still too complicated. Lots of people don't understand what the word means, or how they do it. I spoke to a colleague yesterday who'd never downloaded a podcast for his iPod due to it being Mac formated, yet he now has a PC and didn't want to lose the music he has on it. That's more a shortcoming of iPods - why does an iPod have to be formated differently depending on what you plug it into? As Apple sells more Macs, users going the other way face the same issue, even though it can be overcome. Nonetheless, even with iTunes, it can still be made simpler.

2008 may become the year of DRM-free music, as people want to start loading their music onto their mobiles; their PSPs; their Xboxes; their sat navs. But downloading needs to be made simpler still. And we need more opportunities to do different things. Matt Wells spoke about dynamically inserting ads into Guardian Unlimited's podcasts. So when I download Football Weekly might determine what ad I hear. This goes someway towards what should be achievable, but let's go a step further. If we know your sex and age, delivering relevant advertising would be great. UK listeners might get different advertising to American listeners and so on. At the moment, we have one feed serves all, and short of making people register and subscribe to different streams according to their profiles, this isn't really possible. Yet...

Accountability and accurate targeting are ever important in the advertising world, so these are others areas that podcasting should perhaps address.

Sometimes I wonder about the sanity of the film industry.

The torrent sites currently have for download a high quality copy of a "DVD Screener" of the big new Will Smith film, I Am Legend. The film has only just opened in the UK, and has only been out about three weeks in the US where it's been doing fantastic business.

What's happened is that someone has got hold of a DVD version of the film and ripped it. But what I want to know is this: why are film companies even making DVD screeners of their big films? These discs very existance increases the likelihood of high quality pirate goods getting out.

In actual fact, the only real reasons for doing it are either to pass to critics who are too lazy to go to the cinema to watch the films, or to hand to members of the various groups like the Academy and BAFTA, who give films awards. You see these people, despite having cards that get them free into cinemas, and having special screenings laid on all the time, still can't be bothered to get off their fat backsides and go out to see films the way they were made to be seen. So film companies send them DVD copies to watch at home, in the hope that they might vote for Will Smith as Best Actor or whatever (this is the same industry that openly campaigns for votes with those For Your Consideration ads in the trade press - again a waste of money benefiting only the companies who publish those trade publications).

What the companies are saying is this: it's more important that they win an Oscar than it is that they might suffer significant financial setback if a high quality DVD gets out.

Before Christmas, the film companies were heavily promoting a campaign to persuade us not to be "Knock-off Nigels" and buy pirate DVDs. Yet at the same time, they actively produce DVD versions of films. So while there's little to stop dreadful camcorder versions of films, they're basically giving "Knock-off Nigel" a leg-up by making them.

The whole industry needs a massive kicking to get into the 21st century. They need to stop spending millions on advertising and DVD production for a handful of crusty old fuddy-duddies who can't be bothered to go to the cinema a bit more. And they're fighting a losing battle with internet piracy and dodgy DVD sales.

Personally, I believe that they should be selling DVDs to cinema goers on the way out of the theatre - can you imagine how many parents would have picked up copies of Enchanted on the way out? And the whole awards industry needs a ground up reworking. If members can't be bothered to see films, then they shouldn't be able to vote. And they should be seeing those films in cinemas. Shortlists of films can be put together by committee, and then voted on by the mass electorate once we know for certain that they've seen all the nominated titles.

Another website "optimises" itself for the iPhone. I do hope that every other gadget on the market gets a version of Picasa Webpages that makes best use of its own unique attributes.

As I said previously, I'm getting really fed up of everybody rushing to write iPhone specific versions of their sites. I've no problem with generic mobile versions, or "lite" versions of sites. But it's really dangerous having to write new versions for every device.

I know that some sites that use lots of AJAX actually have browser dependent versions which differ depending on how Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Safari handle different elements, but there are a relatively limited number of browsers.

I've just been looking at this website's "activity log" and was amazed to see how often comment spam comes in. Thank goodness that I've got some basic filtering in place. Yesterday there were 170 attempts to comment here (with one genuine comment), all of which failed because they didn't pass my cunning challenge response box.

Interestingly, I've had one piece of spam come through and reach publishing which did pass the challenge response. I guess that was entered "by hand" which seems a very dull thing to be doing.

In other news, there are some very odd findings coming out of Technorati searches. It seems that people cut and paste things from this blog into other blogs (and link back) purely to include spam links on those blogs. I'm sure that there's a word for this, but I don't know what it is.

Finally, here are some entertaining search terms that resulted in people finding their way onto this site recently:

derek acorah imhotep
tessa dunlop
imhotep derek acorah
sally morgan star psychic
allo, allo british film vicki michelle photos
jeremy kyle merchandise
playback the return of allo allo
sally morgan psychic
"allô, allô" rené download clip
"martina cole" culture show clip
"robert kilroy silk" "new zealand"
"sally morgan" psychic contact details
"star psychic" production company

OK - that's not all of them, and some of the search terms at the bottom are the result of only one search. But what's clear is that the stuff I like least and tend to moan about is what people actually end up here looking at.

I'm guessing that Derek Acorah and Sally Morgan fans are going to be truly disappointed that I think they're frauds who play on the insecurities of the gullible and the emotionally vulnerable (and with any luck, they'll be visiting even more so as a result of this entry!).

I'm also impressed by the number of Allo Allo fans out there, including those who include the correct accents.

The Robert Kilroy Silk search is especially concerning...

There's an interesting piece about Apple's pricing for video in Variety at the moment. It seems that Apple would quite like to drop prices from $1.99 to 99c an episode, and not all the studios are happy. ABC/Disney might bite the bullet, but as an unnamed commenter for the piece says 'it doesn't make sense to charge the same amount for an episode of "The Brady Bunch" as for "Lost."'

Will Apple be able to get away with it? Or will other studios fight back like NBC?

Well, I've bitten the bullet and upgraded to MT 4, and so far everything seems OK. I got it working pretty much straight out of the box, and I took Sixapart's advice and did it as side by side install to allow me to only move across folders that I actually needed. That said, once I'd run the upgrade, MT 3.3x didn't see any blogs, so it's 4 all the way now.

There are a couple of things that I need to fix. I believe I should be able to use CAPTCHA to allow comment approval going forward. But the current system works well, so I'll leave that for another day.

More pressing is MTAmazon which just showed a neat little icon of the current book or DVD that I'm watching. For reasons beyond me, that stopped working a couple of weeks ago. But now with MT 4, I don't yet have a complete solution.

In fact, the whole site needs a visual overhaul - it's something that I've been meaning to do for ages. Back in June this blog celebrated its fifth birthday (yes it passed me by too). I check today, and I've published over a half a million words. Anyway, watch this space as I get around to giving the place a good spring autumn clean.

NBC Universal has fallen out with Apple over the pricing of their products on iTunes with the result that Apple will not be offering any new material for sale from the company via its store. That means no new seasons of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica or The Office - three series that have sold very well on iTunes in the past.

For the most part, people are looking at NBC and thinking that they must be mad. Why would they make it harder to legitimately get hold of downloaded versions of programming when users can just download a torrent of the same programme without any payment.

But I've got to say that actually I think that NBC should be able to price their programming as they see fit. Some reports suggest that under NBC's proposed pricing structure and suggest that costs might rise from the current $1.99 an episode to as much as $4 or even $5 an episode. Well, that's really for them to determine. If they charge too much, then they won't sell any programmes, and that's the nature of a free market.

Apple's insistence in controlling pricing doesn't allow for product differentiation. Heroes is a premium NBC product just now and perhaps can command a premium, whereas an old episode of some eighties detective show might only be 50c. Yet on iTunes it's $1.99 and there's no flexibility. Why shouldn't some of the forthcoming new series be sold at greatly reduced prices to garner interest?

If I walk into my local HMV, or scour the virtual shelves of Amazon, DVD box sets are sold at vastly different price points. I mentioned in my piece a couple of days ago about the launch of the television section on the UK iTunes store that season tickets for series are sometimes more or less expensive than their physical DVD equivalents.

There are many reasons for differentiating prices - sales, old programming or stock, promotions. It's for the retailer and distributor to determine what a series can be sold for.

Similarly, music should have differential pricing too. We're all used to picking up classic albums relatively cheaply. Yet compare a few classic albums on Amazon and iTunes and there can be a vast differential:

Highway 69 Revisted - £9.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Bridge Over Troubled Water - £7.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Parallel Lines - £7.99 on iTunes, £2.97 on Amazon

Yes - Blondie is exceptionally cheap! But old songs and albums really shouldn't be that expensive. And iTunes needs to be able adapt to variable pricing.

Of course, iTunes single price means that Brits pay 79p a track compared with 99c in the US. At the current exchange rate that should be more like 50p. Similarly TV programmes are all £1.89 a show (irrespective of whether they're a 22 minute South Park episode made for peanuts, or 42 minute episode of Grey's Anatomy made for millions of dollars an episode), compared with $1.99 a show in the US.

A lot has been made of Hulu, the new Fox/NBC destination to watch streaming programming. It's basically an attempt to break YouTube's stranglehold. But it's going to stream shows, not let you download them to your iPod or PSP. I wouldn't be surprised if within days of it launching somebody hasn't built a tool to snatch a file version of the stream as you can with YouTube.

In other news, it was interesting to note in HMV today that you'll be able to buy the pilot episode of Heroes for £2.95 on Monday. I can't see them releasing the whole series this way, which makes it an odd experiment. Why not either give it away, or make it a covermount on something like SFX magazine if it's just to drive DVD sales?

A couple of great posts about internet radio revenues in the UK, from James (late of these parts) and Kevin Coy.

While I might rail on incessently about record companies desperately trying to extend copyright periods for no good reason, I passionately believe that performers and artists deserve a fair remuneration for the broadcast of their work in whatever capacity.

Companies like Last.fm seem to just avoid paying fair dues while others stump up.

Have I told you about my great new business idea? It's called Last.movies. Here's how it works. You tell me which movies you like, and you can stream them direct to your PC. My clever algorithm finds other movies you might like based on people with similar movie tastes, and the service will stream those movies to you too. It's great! All you do is log on and watch the movies you love, and movies you don't know but will love. Now I haven't done any deals with any Hollywood outfits, but I'm going to stream the movies anyway, and with luck my website will be so big that all the companies will keel over and do business with me at a fair rate determined by me.

What could possibly be the problem with that?

Just because my great idea is to stream movies you might like based on ones you tell me you like, it doesn't mean that I don't have to licence those movies

We all know that Flickr is really cool don't we? I mean, I've certainly always thought so. Until now.

That's why I was appalled to read this post from Rebekka who's easily one of the more famous Flickr photographers.

She put up a composite of several photos she'd taken of her home country Iceland and explained that they'd all been illegally downloaded and sold by a UK based company for money. Going through sales on eBay, she calculated that they'd benefited to the tune of several thousand pounds. She'd talked to a lawyer in Iceland, but being relatively poor and in another country, he'd been unable to help.

There were hundreds of comments below, not all of which I read, but which were very supportive of her plight.

And now Flickr has removed the whole thing.

Thomas Hawk (another great internet photographer) has more.

Not cool.

[Update] Flickr has apologised.

[Update 2] And fronted it all up in their blog.

I'm looking forward to reading this.

My laptop has had a hidden "service" partition on it since I've had it, so in a fit of tidying up files, instead of handing the space over to Windows, I decided to chuck Ubuntu on it. It's been ages since I had a play around with Linux, so I thought it was worth a punt.

First things first - the installation took no more than twenty minutes from start to finish (once I'd worked out the finer points of the number of partitions it wanted).

I got onto my wifi network in no time at all - and unlike a Windows installation, the computer now had a decent variety of Office-type applications as well as graphics amps like the GIMP.

All very good. One of the annoying things with a new Windows computer is that it immediately sets about downloading loads of updates which tends to annoy you on a new computer. Well to be honest, it's not much different here. 164 downloaded and installed files later, and a single reboot, and I finally was up and running.

I did have install Flash (although I did that before my auto-update), but otherwise most things were working well.

But I did have trouble with the BBC's site. RealPlayer wasn't installed, and installing the open Helix did not seem to help with listening to streaming radio. After a certain amount of fiddling around I was finally able to install RealPlayer, after first uninstalling Helix. It occurs to me that the last time I was typing UNIX command file expressions was 1990 when I was doing things like downloading the complete IMDB from newsgroups and "installing" it locally on my £10k Sun workstation (Incidentally, you can still download IMDB files and install them locally on a machine). I think it's fair to say that to this date, I've not used a more expensive machine - certainly none that just sat on my desktop for my sole use.

Anyway, I digress. I had a bit more of a play around but ended up giving up playing back any audio. Needless to say Virgin Radio worked fine - with the Flash version of the player being automatically chosen. This version of the Virgin Radio player also happily works in the Wii and PS3 (BTW - I note that the PS3 is already being "discounted" to £399 which, while only being a £26 reduction, is practically unheard of with a new launch machine, and just shows quite how much Sony has misjudged the machine's pricing. Will we get any accurate sales information? I certainly won't be buying the stories about how Sony has flooded the market with enough stock to ensure that purchasers are left short. They wanted a complete sellout - make no mistake. Stores should not have to be discounting within days of any product's launch).

So there we go. A dual-boot XP/Ubunutu Linux machine in no time at all. I don't know how useful the alternative operating system will really be, but I must admit that if someone just wanted a cheap laptop for surfing the net, doing their email and writing the odd letter, then it'd be perfect without the need for all the wastefulness of Windows (always assuming your inkjet printer of choice has drivers that will work). It's interesting that Dell's now offering Linux flavoured laptops, although I must admit that I couldn't find them for sale anyway on the UK website.

There's plenty of coverage elsewhere about the whys and wherefores of EMI going DRM-free, with Apple iTunes the first partner. But I will make a couple of comments.

It is brave of EMI, but necessary. By holding out longer, you're just going to piss your customers off, and when you're having as turbulent a time as EMI has been recently, that's simply something you can't afford to do.

I know that all of a sudden, I'm much likelier to buy downloads. I still love CDs and any artist or album I truly want, I'll buy the CD version, but knowing that I "own" it and don't just licence it is very important to me.

Some people have commented on the limited range of hardware outside of the iPod range capable of playing even unencrypted AAC encoded music. Well there are couple of things to point out here. First, iTunes is simply the first vendor to open up the EMI range fully - others will be along very shortly, and for the first time, they're going to be able to properly supply music to iPod owners - by far the largest hardware market share. While I don't suppose we'll exactly see a price-war, the playing field will certainly be flattened. I'd also hope that some of the major record labels will start talking to vendors like eMusic about being included on their services. Secondly, who doesn't think that every major hardware manufacturer is going to be racing to ensure that their mp3 player or mobile phone is capable of playing AAC encoded tracks? There'll be firmware updates for legacy kit, and since the lifecycle of mobile phones is somewhere around 12 months before consumers seek a replacement, we'll see widespread compatability within a very short time-frame.

Apple really don't have much to worry about - as long as they keep producing the smartest and coolest devices, then they're going to be making their money from hardware rather than software.

The Independent's piece today is headlined "EMI concedes defeat in war on internet pirates" and I've just got to say that this is wholly and totally missing the point. The piece itself is quite level-headed, but removing DRM is not giving in to piracy - it's taking on piracy. Previously, if I'd bought an album on iTunes and then bought a non-Apple replacement mp3 player, or perhaps installed an mp3CD-capable car radio, I'd have been forced to either go through the ridiculous process of burning and then re-ripping the audio, or just head into the nether-regions of the internet and download a version someone else has made. Now I don't have to go through that ridiculous process - well not once the hardware out there all supports AAC, but as I've already mentioned, that won't be very long.

Isn't it nice to actually write something nice about the music industry for a change?