Recently in Media Category

This morning, the BBC Trust rejected plans for a local BBC video news service.

Concurrently, Ofcom published the results of its Market Impact Assessment and concluded that the plans would have had a significant negative impact on commercial news providers.

The BBC proposal would have seen it producing more localised news which would be delivered on demand either via fixed or mobile internet. The BBC's aim was to provide another layer of depth to its current local and regional services which often stretch significantly. For example, if you sit in North Norfolk, the local news will also cover goings on in Watford.

Most commercial news providers were utterly opposed to the plans for understandable reasons. Local newspapers have suffered enormously as they've seen their advertising revenues fall. Traditionally much of their cash came from classified ads, and lucrative property and jobs ads. Yet all of these have - to one extent or another - moved over to the internet. As a result, they have less money to invest in news gathering and we're seeing redundancies, and closures. The one thing they have going for them is their ultra-local news. And they didn't want to see the BBC getting their hands on that.

Meanwhile, local commercial radio operators were similarly opposed to the BBC's plans. As well as their on-air local news provision, the more forward thinking operators have been investing in online local news provision as the newspaper groups have. They want their sites to become the local news portals for a given region. If successful, they're in a strong place to develop new online revenues (seemingly the only area of the UK media landscape that is showing growth).

They make good points, and I think the BBC Trust and Ofcom are probably right. But I think we also need to think forward a little. As newspapers suffer, so their newsrooms are shrinking. Fewer reporters mean that news is harder to come by. As Nick Davies pointed out in his excellent book Flat Earth News, with a retrenchment in journalists, comes a retrenchment in journalism. No longer does either a local newspaper or local news agency have a regular person sitting in the local courts or council chambers all the time.

And we're seeing some local radio news operations being cut back - either by creating news "hubs" for a group of local services, or by even removing the one advantage local radio stations have over other broadcasters, and removing local news at certain times of the day altogether.

Can we really get all our local news online? I'm not sure we can.

If there aren't any decent primary news gatherers - i.e. local news reporters on the ground - then everybody will be republishing the same Press Association copy. And that's not enough. Like elsewhere in an open society, competition is important for news providers too.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, but as budgets are squeezed, plurality of news providers remains important. If we all rely on one source - something that we're getting closer and closer to - then we become less open. Without the concern that your competitor is going to scoop you, a reporter isn't as incentivised to work harder and dig deeper. Who's going to look hard into more difficult stories?

Perhaps beyond that danger is nobody at all covering the news. Local newspapers will have closed down. Local radio will cover things at a very superficial level perhaps having one or two people in the newsroom (including the newsreader). And local television won't really exist and the likes of ITV offers the same "local" news for everyone between Carlisle and Newcastle.

As ever, these are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

The BBC Trust reported today on lots of things. Of most interest to the press was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco. But frankly, that's so dull now, I can't be bothered to get into it at all. Tomorrow's papers will be all over it.

Of far more interest, in the same report, is the response to Jonathan Ross' interview with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Undoubtedly Ross was crass, and like "complainant 1" in the report, it wasn't the languarge per se that I found troubling, but the context. Ross was like some juvenile schoolboy, and you got the feeling the Paltrow was just being professional in agreeing to everything and going along with Ross.

Maybe she did find it funny, but I don't agree. And it was seeing this particular episode that meant that I wasn't surprised by Ross' later antics with Brand.

Do I want him to continue to be irreverand? Absolutely. But I don't want to be squirming in discomfort when I watch his show.

I never know quite what to make of Children in Need. Simplistically it's simply a fund-raiser to help children in variety of ways shapes and forms. And nobody can argue with that.

But there are the other elements of it, that I always find uncomfortable. It's notable that Channel 4 always gives its comedy programmes a week off when Children in Need is on. This time around it ran Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Then there are the big cheques from large corporations - supermarkets and the like - that all have the companies names on them. With the cancellation of the Jonathan Ross show, bands and artists with their Christmas releases out, have nothing much beyond GMTV or This Morning to appear from. So Children in Need this year gets a big name line-up. They're all doing it for the kids you understand, and not to remind people who only buy one new CD a year that their new albums are in shops now.

Certainly the various soaps compete to outdo one another with either musical numbers or bizarre crossovers with other shows. And then there's the regular news readers song and dance number. They're harmless enough.

But we get West End musicals that helpfully all advertise their availability (do theatre audiences get short-changed on Children in Need night, or do they all hop on limo-bikes to W12?).

I know I always sound like I'm some kind of anti-charity person, and Children in Need is in no way as bad as Comic Relief in the way that commercial sponsors get thirty seconds on the BBC (that truly is outrageous, and I really hope it changes next time around), but I still get a little uncomfortable at the commercial aspects.

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?

I like a souvenir as much as anyone. So with Obama getting in, picking a copy of that day's New York Times seemed like an idea. Copies are printed in the UK, but it's a "lite" version and time differences mean that it has to go to press very early.

This evening on NBC's Nightly News, Brian Williams reported that copies were selling on eBay for as much as $30-50 each. Indeed a quick search reveals that I can pick up a copy for over £60 plus another £15 postage.

The I decided to visit the New York Times store which happily sells copies for $14.95 and that includes international postage. Sure, that's a bit of premium over the regular $1.50 price, but I think it still represents good value.

Finding poor journlism in the Sunday papers isn't really hard, but The Observer had this story in yesterday's paper. It begins:

Media regulator Ofcom warned BBC bosses about lax editorial procedures on Russell Brand's BBC 6 Music show over a year ago, it emerged last night. In a ruling published 15 months ago, it criticised the corporation for failing to follow its own editorial procedures and allowing Brand to broadcast a quiz won by a member of his production team posing as a listener to the digital radio station. [My emphasis]

Hang on. Nothing "emerged last night". Basically, this story seems to have come about by someone Googling the Ofcom website in the hunt for material on Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross.

What The Observer has simply dug up is the small matter of all the competition faking has now been fully [un]covered over the last 18 months. This didn't so much "emerge" as hit newspaper front and inside pages a year or so ago now. This isn't new news. Every single interested reader already knows about this.

At the end of July this year, the BBC was fined £400,000 by Ofcom including £17,500 for the Russell Brand show. At the time, the show was still being made by the BBC and not Brand's independent production company. And I'd hazard a guess that the producer was different at the time (it referred to an incident that took place in April 2006 when Brand was still on 6 Music).

Let me re-iterate: this fine or the details behind it didn't emerge last night. It was published on 31 July this year - three full months ago. Note to Observer journos: Ofcom has a free mailing list. They'll email you this stuff as it comes out. I highly recommend it. Alternatively, they could have read all the coverage at the time.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't accidentally pick up the Mail on Sunday yesterday in place of The Observer (there wasn't a free Cliff Richard CD after all), so quite why The Observer is publishing such lazy journalism as this inexplicable.

This was an entirely different kind of breach, and as can be seen from the list and the extensive press reports we've had over the last eighteen months, it affected everything from Blue Peter to Jo Whiley to Children in Need.

Look, I know that editorial floors around the country are desperately trying to keep the Brand/Ross story alive. Our fearless investigators will undoubtedly be attending every gig Brand performs at for the next six months, and burlesque troops around the capital will have more fans than usual at the stage door. But I buy a quality Sunday to find out - you know - important stuff going on in the world, not warmed up stuff that everyone else reported three months ago.

So the Ross/Brand things has blown up out of all proportion. Seriously. The scale of the media frenzy is in no way proportional to what actually happened. When I wrote about this the other day, I did so in a way that discussed something that would be of interest to people who read Media Guardian.

Reporting the number of complaints that the BBC or Ofcom or whoever has received is facile and meaningless. It only invites comments about why those people aren't complaining about more important things.

If you want to find worse things that are happening in broadcasting in the UK, I suggest that you subscribe to Ofcom's Broadcast Bulletins. They send around a neat weekly email which runs through them. This week, they fined a TV station £15,000 for broadcasting some guy who claimed that his homeopathic remedy cured cancer. That's outrageous.

It's clear that the likes of Sky and the Mail are egging on the debate in a massive way, but frankly that's irrelevant. Similarly irrelevant are the media aspirations of Sachs' grand-daughter. Anybody who says otherwise is on a dangerous road towards the "she was asking for it with those clothes on" type defence of attacks on women. And Sachs' age is also irrelevant.

Sky News' coverage would lead you to perhaps not realise what's going on elsewhere in the world right now. The Congo, US interest rates, umm, David Tennant quitting Doctor Who. That sort of thing. I'm surprised they don't have the Sky Copter up hovering over Brand's house. This is on a scale not seen since Maddie went missing. Just to be clear, the coverage of that was abhorrent and unnecessary too.

It's clear now, that both Ross and Brand have realised they've done wrong and are sincerely sorry. Brand's quit his show - which frankly was wrong for Radio 2 anyway, and curiously placed on a Saturday night at the precise time that many of his prospective listeners would not be around (Prior to Humphrey Lyttleton's death, his 11pm Monday jazz programme got a bigger audience than Brand's 9pm Saturday show).

Of course Brand still has his stand-up, his new C4 series, a new hardback book, a new paperback book, the odd presenting gig and a burgeoning film career. He won't be destitute.

So where to now? Well Ross will be off the TV and radio for a while. A producer will be fired. I doubt anyone senior at Radio 2 will have to walk. Everyone at the BBC will have to attend some new course like they did for running competitions. And that'll be that.

It's fair to say that this has been poorly handled by the BBC. As soon as someone senior had listened back to what went out - ie. last week, before most of the press got into the game - they should have carried out their suspensions and investigations. Leaving things to drag on this week has helped nobody.

And I really don't understand why politicians - beyond perhaps, those at the DCMS - or anyone else really, are getting involved. They really ought to be asking why ITV is no longer providing a proper local news service, and is getting rid of all its PSB remit. Serious issues.

I do despair of our media sometimes and the ignorant coverage we get. I really do.

Word magazine's website has a great list of things that people find annoying - or the dumbest things in entertainment. It's a great list, and you can't help but nod as contributors add more and more.

Someone halfway down the list mentions half-hour TV programmes that throw-forward to the second 15 minutes just before the ad-break, then re-cap the first 15 minutes when they return from the break before summarising what's going to happen next.

This doesn't happen on just commercial TV either. BBC programmes have annoying habit of doing precisely the same thing, even though there's not really a break in the programme except to trail the next section. Perhaps they do it because at some point the show will appear on UKTV Homes Style + 1, and then it'll need it because the average viewer of that channel only watches 6 minutes a year, so needs to understand what's happening in that 6 minutes.

Anyway, it's become obvious that these things are terribly easy and formulaic to make. Let's use Highland Emergency as an example. This is a Granada produced programme for Five. I've seen several episodes because I have a bizarre fascination for all things set in the Highlands of Scotland.

The show basically follows Scottish emergency services to various accidents and emergencies. In particular, they especially love helicopter emergencies.

The show opens with a brisk run-through of the exciting accidents and emergencies we're going to see in this week's episode as a teaser. Then we get the well produced opening credits with lots of helicopters and dangling winchmen.

Next we're introduced to the crew of a particular helicopter - let's say it's a Royal Navy crew. They're called to Ben Nevis or somewhere where a climber has been injured. The voiceover tells us that the person almost certainly needs immediate medical care, and that it's a thirty minute flight to Ben Nevis. We see a graphic of a map indicating where on the Ben the injured party is lying. The crew search for and find the missing person. But it's too dangerous to land, so someone will be winched down, although crosswinds make this treachourous...

CUT TO: A quick graphic that has a helicopter and the word emergency.

VOICEOVER: Meanwhile in Lossiemouth...

The action could just stay with the injured party on Ben Nevis, but no. In case we get bored, it instead shows us a different crew, somewhere else, who have to rescue someone who's torn a ligament on a remote Scottish island.

The injured person is on a beach. We're anxiously told that the crew refer to tide times. The tide's coming in. It really is urgent!

Then we arrive on the beach, and there's no sign of the incoming tide. Not only that, but local doctors/paramedics are on the scene. There was little danger of anyone being washed out to sea. The tide's still so far out that the helicopter can happily land on the beach, but before they load up...

We get a preview of what happens next. We see clips we've already seen of the helicopter over Ben Nevis, swiftly followed by clips we've just seen of a helicopter landing on a beach. And because there's no hope of stretching these two cases out through another 15 minute (well 10 minutes once you remove ads) segment, we're told of a third case in Aviemore of someone who's, er, twisted an ankle on a ski-run.

After the break, we get more generic graphics of helicopters and the word "emergency." Then we return to Ben Nevis, with another resumé of the previous action, before we see that, yes, the climber was successfully hauled into the chopper. This is intercut with a few interviews of the crew basically telling us what we've just seen with our own eyes, and what a voiceover person has just told us.

The now familiar graphic of helicopter alongside the word emergency allows us to cut to the new story featuring a doctor who looks after injuries on a ski-run. Who'd have thought? A teenager has twisted an ankle. It hurts, and she's cold. She's brought back to some kind of hut where she looks sulky like any teenager - albeit one in pain. But before anything else happens...

We cut back to the person on the beach who's very unlikely to drown. They're loaded aboard the helicopter and returned to Aberdeen hospital where they're treated.

One more look at the graphic and we're back to Aviemore, where stroppy (but in pain) teenager is loaded into another ambulance and sent off to hospital.

A final graphical interlude and we see clips from all the incidents we've just seen, this time with some kind of special effect applied to the footage - perhaps they're now in black and white. The voiceover tells us that each person went to hospital and what they were treated for. They all lived.

Finally we get a sneak look at next week's programme in which some climbers are in trouble on a mountain, someone's hurt at a ski-resort and someone has a threatening condition on a remote Scottish island.

Repeat times 13.

Of course there's a little more to it than that. The producers tie together stories that happen at night with others than take place around the same time. The implication is always that these things are happening simultaneously, when you know perfectly well that they were probably months apart, that's why it looks like summer in once case, but another takes place in snow covered peaks (Yes - I know that snow covers some peaks pretty much all year round). The same goes for episodes set in poor weather and so on.

Now I'm not knocking these series too much, but they really don't add much to the sum of human knowledge, and the A to B to C editing-by-rote is just a bit sad. There's a really good series to be made with these emergency services, but a Five budget for the 7.30pm slot (up against the soaps), is never going to be enough.

A cracking article from New York magazine on product placement and it's implications. Well worth a read.

Throughout the year, there's a never ending series of conferences around the country on all sorts of subjects. It's not surprising as they make lots of money. Fees from delegates easily pay for the conference room facilities and a buffet lunch leaving lots of cash in pure profit. Speakers aren't usually paid with perhaps only their travel and accommodation paid for. But enough of that.

I've had several recent invitations to another conference - The Media Festival. Sounds important doesn't it? Perhaps I should go?

"We have delegates from TV, film, advertising, online, music, interactive, mobile, games and beyond. Join us today for an unrivalled networking opportunity!"

Umm. Well of course advertising, online, music, mobile, interactive and "beyond" are relevant. But isn't there at least one major media missing? In fact there are at least a couple. No radio and no press. Perhaps the festival might better be called The TV With A Bit Of Online Festival?

Now I don't want to sound too overly defensive about the media that I work for. But the trade magazine Broadcast behaves the same way. "Broadcast" refers really to only two media - TV and radio. Everything else relies on different distribution methods. Of course TV is more glamorous and sexy, and there's more news about it as well (although the fact that UK TV Style has commissioned ten episodes of some makeover programme is on a par with finding out that LBC has changed it's overnight weekend presenter). But you do have to turn to page 12 of the magazine to reach any radio news this week.

And, er, that page is it. The magazine runs to 36 pages.

Perhaps it's just the industry we're in.

Still, it can't be easy working for Broadcast. The Letters column regularly runs to a single letter which suggests that nobody actually ever writes to the magazine.

At least this week we do get the pleasure of a double page interview with BBC3's controller Danny Cohen - the man who's just cancelled the only decent sitcom he's got left, Pulling.

It's an unfortunate coincidence that just days after I'd first used The Times' archive for a little project that I'm working on, that they announce to registered users that it'll have a paywall from the end of this week (confusingly, they list the date as Friday 18 September when there isn't such a day).

Still I did at least find what I was looking for on this occassion.

Sadly it mirrors what Guardian newspapers have done with their archive. The Times is a little cheaper with access charged at £4.95 for a day, then £14.95 a month and £74.95 a year. The Guardian is £7.95 for a day, £14.95 for three days and £49.95 for a month - so significantly more.

I fully understand the value of these archives, and the work that must have gone into digitising all those papers. But it's a shame that the prices are where they are. Plenty of people will still be visiting their local reference libraries for access.

This comes a week after Google announced that it was digitising a number of US papers. The Google effort seems to be ad-funded, although I can't see a clear promise that these will be available free in future. And Google doesn't seem to offer an easy way of downloading the articles, something you certainly can do with The Times' archive.

Still, I did enjoy this side-story from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of the Apollo 11 landings in 1969:

I never knew that it had been given the working title "Picnic", but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice.

Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services - Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three - off the Freeview platform, and use the space to put four or so new subscription channels on in its place. It would use a higher spec of encoding that would mean consumers needed new boxes to both decode this, and to provide a slot for their subscription smart cards.

Ofcom wasn't too happy and the whole thing disappeared deep into Ofcom's Southwark Bridge offices for further consultation. Sky was an original partner of Freeview, and suddently DTT wouldn't quite be so free.

The cynic in me thought that this was a chance to get back at Setanta who was soon to be launching with Premier League football. And due to their tie-up with Top-Up TV, they'd be on Freeview, unlike Sky.

At Sky News, they were a bit unhappy as not only were they off Virgin Media (and still are, I believe), but now they were coming off Freeview.

Ofcom has quite forceably responded to Sky's press statements regarding the suspension of development work on Picnic. In particular they highlight a tardiness on Sky's part to get responses to them on deadline and in full detail.

So a questionmark must hang over how serious a proposition this ever was. On the one hand, the venture had employed as many as 70 people (doing what, exactly, beyond technical work and responding to Ofcom, is a little unclear)., but the original hope had been to put something in place in time for the start of the last football season. The idea was surely to confuse a marketplace that Setanta was then entering into.

I suspect that Sky is now not so fussed about Setanta. They've certaininly come out well following last week's debacle. As yesterday's Observer noted, they've made Rupert Murdoch look like the good guy.

It'll be interesting yet to read what Ofcom has to say, but adopting MPEG 4 still feels like something to do further down the line, when Freeview HD starts. Still, it'll be worth watching what happens to this most popular of digital television formats.

There's a widely reported story today about a report examining how alcohol is covered in the media. In particular the perceived glamourisation of excessive drinking by radio DJs such as Chris Moyles.

You can read coverage at the BBC News site, and in all the papers (here are links to the story in The Guardian and the Telegraph).

An interesting and worthwhile story? Undoubtedly. But the critic in me would quite like to see the full report. It's not that I don't trust the reporters the papers and news organisations allocated to the story, but, err, I don't always. For example, Chris Moyles is repeatedly mentioned but there's no mention of, say, Christian O'Connell or Johnny Vaughan. Now that might be because they're exemplary models of restraint who don't glamourise excessive drinking. Or it might be because the report didn't cover them. Yet we read that "Commercial radio stations were worse offenders than the BBC."

In fact, according to the Telegraph's piece:

The study focused on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1Xtra, Kiss 101 broadcasting to the South West and Wales, Key 103 for Greater Manchester, Galaxy Birmingham and Kerrang! Radio for the West Midlands.

But that fact doesn't appear in most of the reports. That's why I wanted to read the full document. I know that what actually has happened is that a press release for the report has been sent out, and most stories are probably generated from that. The report's author Professor Norma Daykin will have been available for interview, and that'll differentiate the reports. Finally, the report itself may have been sent to journalists, but how many do you really think read it all the way through?

That's why I'd like to read it for myself. The BBC site doesn't include it, and neither do stories at the other papers' sites I've looked at. The research was carried out at the University of the West of England, but their website reveals no obvious links. The research was funded by the Department of Health, but again I had no luck finding it online there. It's part of the Know Your Limits campaign conducted in association with the Home Office. No luck there at either or the two websites I found - your guess is as good as mine as to why there are two.

The report is being presented o the British Sociological Association in Brighton, I read, but once again, an online search is fruitless aside from an abstract (P12 of this Word document).

The reason I want to see the report is that it's important to understand how much audio was listened to over what period (e.g. Was it carried out over the Christmas period? Answer: Yes - from December to February according to the Telegraph piece, but then they had a medical reporter rather than a media reporter cover the story). I've mentioned the issue regarding stations monitored and they've obviously concentrated on youth orientated services. But they ignored Scotland and Northern Ireland which might have thrown up different results for example.

The internet allows us to be able to present primary material and given that this research was state-funded, it should be easily available for us all to download and read. It shouldn't just be kept to attendees of academic conferences, and published in expensive journals or online in locked academic databases.

There's an entertaining blog on Media Guardian that compares the route that my employers have taken in rebranding Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio compared with the route taken by Revolution in Oldham:

For years the station bucked the trend of better music mixes and instead served up alternative indie and rock, making presenters out of local musical icons...

But then a fortnight ago, without any prior announcement, the station's music policy changed beyond recognition. The curious sounds of credible bands you'd never heard of dispersed into the Mancunian ether, replaced overnight by perennial favourites James Blunt, the Bee Gees and Take That. No explanation. Big gaps everywhere. Lots of adverts. Ace of Base.

Bizarrely, the clearly furious presenters were still allowed to go on air. Upon playing Elton John's I'm Still Standing, one presenter commented angrily: "No, this isn't ironic." It was to be his last comment on the matter; non-stop music followed.

[UPDATE] Steve Penk bought the station!

That could explain a lot!

Martin Kelner's been penning some very honest pieces about radio over the last few months, and today's is as true as any of them.

Talking about Kenny Everett is possibly a little hackneyed - sorry if that sounds heretical. But in essence, what he says is true. It seems to be TV personalities only who get shows. It's always nice to see a radio talent shine through.

Here's an ad that I'm 99.999% certain that you haven't seen.

It's a Russ and Jono ad for Virgin Radio that was never actually aired. This is a rough cut without final graphics or sound, but it still gives you a good idea of what they were trying to do.

Today there are over seven million DAB digital radios in use in the UK, although it's future still has a few question marks hanging over it rightly or wrongly. But it's fascinating to go back and see how the system was first launched.

So amongst some of the videos I've recently been going through at Virgin Radio, I was interested to find the following.

The first is a BBC TV News report covering the BBC's launch of services to actually listen to. Edward Stourton tells us that the first radios won't be available for a couple of years when they'll cost £700. And there's a cracking shot of a group of people on a coach all listening via headphones to the service in this report from Torin Douglas.

Ironically, the main technical advantage that's given in this report over FM, is the ability to listen to DAB in the car, when in reality that's the main obstacle that's still to be overcome with in-car radios still relatively rare, and audio cutting out in a more irritating fashion than FM does.

It's also interesting to hear that the cost of DAB was a worry for commercial radio from the very start with Virgin Radio's own David Campbell concerned about costs.

A couple of years later and consumer DAB sets were very nearly ready. So Tomorrow's World covered DAB in this report. The sounds a bit poor, I'm afraid, as the VHS tape it was captured from was pretty poor and quite possibly a second generation tape.

It's probably best to gloss over references to "CD quality", but again there are lots of references to the poor quality of FM on the move. And I wonder where you can get one of those DAB Renault Espaces?

Sadly we never have reached the point where we can choose between five different football commentaries, but then the rights holders probably preclude that to an extent (in TV of course we have interactive Olympics on the BBC, and Sky offering nearly every Champions' League game).

And we've still got a way to go before we see screens like those demoed by Peter Snow at the end of Jez Nelson's report.

In the run-up to Virgin Radio rebranding as... - well, we'll have to wait and see what precisely it becomes - I've been digging through the vaults to see what old TV ads I could find.

Here's the first second ad which ran sometime after the launch of FM in 1995 featuring Russ and Jono. There where lots of very subtly different versions depending on whether it was the 1215AM or 105.8FM frequency that was relevant to viewers, the amount being given away (£10,000, £15,000 or £20,000), and whether the prospective listener should tune in on "Monday" or "tomorrow morning."

Anyway, without further ado, here are three variants to give you a flavour.

Under a new deal announced today by the ECB... precisely nothing changes. Sky has retained live rights to... well... everything. And Five has a highlights package.

Sky undoubtedly does a superb job. They've got lots of resources and they've innovated with new technology high-definition coverage, and super-slomo cameras (Although I did laugh on Saturday when it seemed as though play might continue through to the Sunday and David "Bumble" Lloyd told us details about how people in the ground on the Saturday could buy reduced price tickets on the Sunday "for those of you listening on earpieces." With the best will in the world, nobody listening via earpiece in a cricket ground is hearing the Sky audio feed - they're listening to Test Match Special on Radio 4 LW and Five Live Sports Xtra (not that the BBC admit that it's on R4 LW). Listening to a feed available only via satellite is not technically possible without some clever wizardry perhaps involving a laptop and a slingbox).

But the sad fact is that a 45 minute highlight package is not going energise the next generation of young cricketers. When England won the Ashes in 2005 there was a ticker-tape parade with a massive celebration in Trafalgar Square. That simply wouldn't happen again because the majority of the population would see, at best, highlights.

There will be no live cricket on terrestrial free-to-air television until 2013 at the earliest.

Now the ECB has admonished the BBC for not bidding this time around. Undoubtedly it's disappointing, and it's simply not true that the BBC couldn't accommodate a Test Series. One-day cricket - in particular Twenty20 - could easily be scheduled.

That said, the BBC has countered the ECB's accusations by declaring that "We have always said that any bid for live test cricket is subject to value for money and ability to schedule. In our view neither of these criteria were met."

I suspect that it's less scheduling issues than a value for money test that has kept the BBC out of the fray. The fact of the matter is that if the ECB is simply trying to maximise its revenues, then the BBC is never going to be able to outbid Sky. Sports is Sky's raison d'etre and it's simply not good value to pay over the odds. But the ECB could surely have adopted some kind of strategy that essentially meant that subject to some kind of minimum, at least some tests would be available to terrestrial broadcasters.

No form of cricket is accorded Full Live Protected Coverage, so if Sky wants to outbid all and sundry then it's able to.

It's interesting that several other broadcasters including ITV, Channel 4 and Setanta were interested in one-day coverage but none bid. They all knew that they'd be trumped by Sky.

If the ECB was serious about wanting to broaden the coverage of cricket, they should have put at least some rights out to tender to terrestrial broadcasters only. And in the long run, while they're undoubtedly generating more cash than ever before, they're still the losers.

Cricket is in a mess in any case, with all sorts of tournaments setting up left right and centre. Players are likely to be torn between club and country with some incredible riches seemingly available in the various Twenty20 leagues that are popping up. I'd love to see some impartial attendance figures because while Twenty20 is undoubtedly selling out, I wonder if it's not getting harder and harder to fill grounds as cricket fans essentially die out.

This won't end with cricket by the way. Both FIFA and UEFA are keen to remove fixtures from their finals tournament from the Listed Events. Currently the whole tournaments have to be screened terrestrially, but they argue that we only need to see games involving the home nations and perhaps the final on terrestrial television. That'd allow them to sell those other games to satellite broadcasters. It's something we really need to look out for.

As a consequence of the BBC running fraudulent competitions, Ofcom has fined the Corporation £400,000.

Undoubtedly, mistakes - whether deliberate or not - were made. And some kind of remedial action was necessary.

When ITV or GCap were recently fined, you didn't hear me complaining. But both of those organisations are commercial companies, and therefore fines have to come straight from the bottom line. Shareholder's receive lower dividends as the company makes a smaller profit.

The BBC is funded by us - the licence fee payers. £400,000 is equivalent to complete licence fees for 2,867 homes. And the cheques (the total amount is from several separate instances) have to be made payable to HM Paymaster General.

In other words, as a result of this fine, that's £400,000 less that can be spent on programming. Storyville, for example, had a budget cut rumoured to be around £1m. Depending on how it was spent, that money could have made several hours of programming.

Did the BBC do wrong? Absolutely. Should those responsible accept the blame, and even in extreme cases, be fired? Certainly. But should the viewer foot the bill? I don't think so.

Now I don't have all the answers. What kind of powers should be available to a regulator to ensure that the state broadcaster doesn't repeat these things in the future? Well job security of responsible people is one, although it's usually the people at the bottom who feel that force. Is a particular producer solely responsible, and in any case, does that prevent other cases ever becoming exposed. Firing someone is simplistic but very extreme.

I don't know what should be done aside from making right financial wrongs (e.g. reimbursing viewers or listeners who paid to enter competitions they had no chance of winning). But it seems to me that the BBC has reacted properly as the various frauds became apparent. It has in place now incredibly detailed systems - arguably too onerous - to prevent similar things happening again. It's wearing its hair-shirt. Fining the viewers and listeners is not the answer.

As a postscript, please go over to The New Yorker's website and read Charles Van Doren's account of the quiz show scandals on the fifties, as depicted in the film Quiz Show. It's a fascinating inside account of the first big competition scandal, and how it impacted Van Doren himself.

Good news all - there's a new "Knock Off Nigel" campaign airing on TV and radio (in reality this has been running for a few weeks now, but since ITV has seemingly given up for the summer - apart from ITV4's Tour coverage - and Channel 4 is a no go area for me with its horrific BB programming, I've not seen the ad at all). For the uninitiated, this is a campaign targeting people who download pirate films from the internet. The campaign targets them as being "Knock Off Nigels" because they're so cheap. Both radio and television campaigns are accompanied by an annoying catchy ditty that's sung in a variety of styles. Obviously, during a credit crunch, being "cheap" is probably a wise and sensible attitude to take - just as long as you're not downloading films. Thinking about it, perhaps I won't spend £19 to see Batman in the Odeon Leicester Square after all. After all, it'll be cheaper on Blu-Ray than that when it comes out, and that's for one solitary person (OK - the most expensive seats, but really!).

I say the ad's "catchy" - but it's only catchy in the same way syphilis is. It has the same broad appeal as someone running their fingernails down a blackboard. I suppose that means that it gets noticed. But is it effective?

Well undoubtedly piracy of films and DVDs is a big problem, but equating the people who do it to people who steal cash from their mum's purse (as the official website does) is just unrealistic. Are people who download movies social parriahs? Not really any more so than people who buy dodgy DVDs from blokes outside pubs or at car boot sales. I guess that's what the ad's trying to do, although you might question the effectiveness of it from some of the comments accompanying the ad on Youtube (I refuse to embed the ad because it's hideous).

The problem they face is that downloading films comes across as victimless. If I did steal a tenner from my mum, then she'd be down ten pounds. But if I download a film, only the film companies are going to be out any cash, and we all know that they're vast corporations raking the cash in and paying their stars ridiculous amounts of money for minimal amounts of work. I'm not saying that this is the right attitude, but it's a prevalent one.

When it comes to it, I want to see The Dark Knight in all its widescreen Dolby Digital IMAX glory and not see something somebody shot with their Handycam in a busy cinema.

Anyway, I should leave the last word to those fine folk over at BrokenTV who came up with the poster below.

"And for the DVD buying public, we can expect to suffer the perpetual indignity of being treated like filthy criminals no longer, being able to watch an episode of Arrested Development on shiny disc without having to suffer an unskippable lecture. Every. Single. Time."

Incidentally, the Knock Off Nigel website allows you to download their "catchy" jingle as a mobile ringtone. Someone obviously sat down and noted that "kids" like downloading ringtones, so why not make it available? In real life it hasn't really become more popular than the Nokia ringtone has it?

The real final word comes from The IT Crowd:

I wrote a little piece for the One Golden Square blog on RAJAR last week which it's worth directing you to.

I'd also suggest you read Martin Kelner in today's Guardian.

If you read the right sort of newspapers, you couldn't help but fail to notice that the fifth and final series of The Wire premiered on FX channel in the UK this week.

Then this morning, the various media sites, including Mediaguardian publish the fact that "only" 38,000 people watched the show last night. More people, it seemed, had watched Family Guy and NCIS earlier in the evening.

So is this as disastrous a figure as the reports might have you think, even if they don't out and out say that? Well of course not. There are several things to consider when reporting overnights for shows such as this:

1) Unlike Channel 4, the repeat on FX+ later that evening wasn't included. Ordinarily, perhaps because they have an alert press office, the Channel 4+1 figures are reported for major shows on that channel. OK, so a midnight repeat probably didn't garner many extra people, but it will have gathered a few.

2) FX will be repeating this show on several occassions throughout the week. We don't all watch at the first opportunity, and in the multi-channel world, same week repeats are important.

3) BARB really can't cope with overnights of a single programme at 10pm on a channel like FX. In total there are just 5,100 homes on the panel. I don't know how many of them are multi-channel, but let's be generous and assume that 4,500 of them are in multichannel homes. As I say, I don't have the actual figures, but run with me. At 10pm last night something like 21m people were watching one or another channel out of a total population of perhaps 50m. So roughly 1,890 BARB "boxes" were recording viewing. We learn that FX had a 1% share at that point in time so we're talking about roughly 19 boxes being in play. Perhaps just 19 homes then. That's simply not a statistically significant number to be working with - it only takes a handful of people to massive affect FX's viewing figures. So the 38,000 should probably be taken with a certain amount of salt.

4) In any case, channels like FX will be looking at an overall weekly or monthly average share. Programmers there will be looking at the broader picture and selling their airtime accordingly.

In reality The Wire, for all its plaudits, has never had strong viewing figures, including on its home network HBO, where it was something to be proud of rather than to gain viewers as other shows might. That's the only way it has managed to win 5 seasons. I suspect that many more people are watching the DVDs than watching on FX.

I see from today's Broadcast that ITV2 has commissioned "FM" a 6 x 30 minute sitcom about a "neurotic indie DJ" who works at Skin FM. The sitcom will apparently feature real bands and current tracks which is quite an interesting idea - if you think about it, with the exception of trails, sports montages and the radio left on in various pubs and cafés in the soaps, contermporary music is fairly missing from mainstream TV (OK - there's been Glastonbury, T in the Park and Later..., but that's still a limited amount).

Anyway, we'll probably have to wait until next year to see the fruits of this labour, but I wonder if it can be as good as other sitcoms set in radio stations. There was Frasier of course which is fairly peerless as a sitcom. Then there was The Lenny Henry Show from 87/88 which was set in a pirate radio station somewhere in South London and also featured Gina McKee. I know there's WKRP in Cincinatti which always seemed to be on late at night when I was younger, but I can't say I really watched it (and from all accounts the DVDs are a shadow of the real show since nearly all the music has had to have been replaced for copyright reasons).

But I think Kit Curran, the self proclaimed "king of the airwaves" must be my favourite. Starring Denis "Wedge" Lawson, there were two series of it. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (and much internet searching is unclear on the matter), the first series was broadcast on ITV, while the second series ended up on Channel 4. Anyway, given some of the rubbish that's being released on DVD these days, it must surely get a release one day.

Like all those interminable list programmes which Channel 4 doesn't seem to run quite as often as it once did, Mediaguardian today published its list of the Media Top 100 2008.

Of course it's largely designed to rile large numbers of the actual people in the list who are lower than they believe that they should be and to cause the rest of us to loudly condemn the list.

The criteria used is thus:

A panel of experienced media watchers from the worlds of politics, journalism, advertising and the internet judged entrants using three criteria: cultural influence, economic clout and political power of all candidates.

It's not really bothered getting too wound up by the list but I will say this: I liked Gavin and Stacey as much as the next person, but that's not enough to put James Corden and Ruth Jones into the list. They've written two series of a sitcom and that's it. Their next projects obviously will get commissioned regardless, but then so will those of Russell T Davies (31), Stephen Fry (54) and Jeremy Clarkson (58).

Then there's the dominance of newspapers - seemingly every national editor is noteworthy from the biggest selling paper The Sun (3,089,321 daily) to The Independent (233,973). Yet Andy Parfitt, controller of Radio 1 (11,067,000 weekly) does not make list. So despite running a station that's only marginally less popular than Lesley Douglas' network (19), he's not worthy. And the less said about Katie Price on the list the better.

Here's a remarkable story from Wired. It refers to ongoing talks in the US where the record industry is trying to make the radio industry pay royalties to singers and musicians. Unlike the UK, where both songer writers and the performing artists separately get paid by radio stations, in the US only the songwriters get paid. Performers are unpaid on the basis that radio station airplay is giving them free publicity to sell their product.

And so one side or another has been posting tins of herring ("red herring" - geddit?), a dictionary, and a set of digital downloads (including "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band and "A Change Would Do You Good" by Sheryl Crow).

Thanks to my employer's new owners' blog, I should also point you to this report commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters who look after radio stations' interests. It attempts to put an actual value on the cumulative sales that radio stations generate. It concludes that between 14% and 23% of music sales can be directly attributed to radio, and that any change in the status quo might disrupt this income stream (approx $1.5 to $2.3 billion annually).

"If a new performance fee were enacted, stations could reduce the amount of music airplay, change formats and even cease to operate, resulting in the loss of much of this promotional benefit."

I'm not entirely sure I buy that given that most of the rest of the Western world pays performers. Some of those US stations must really be struggling if they'd close down ahead of paying a small percentage of their income to the performers whose work their entire livelihood is based on!

What other industry doesn't pay for the main constituent of its business? If I want to make a film based on a Stephen King novel, I don't just say to King - don't ask me for any cash, but think of all those additional book sales you'll get when my film comes out!

If you're at all interested in the future of radio in this country - then you might want to read this interim report which has just shown up on the DCMS website.

In summary there are two sets of key things to take from this:

- DAB should become the primary platform for all national, regional and large local services. So that's all the BBC national, commercial national and major local and regional services going to DAB exclusively.

- Community and smaller local stations will need to remain on analogue as the most cost effective way of delivering radio. But a plan for migrating them to digital should be worked on.

- In places where DAB rollout is not economic (especially rural areas), listeners should not be disadvantaged, and restructuring the FM network should take place. People in those areas are not going to lose their current services.

- A concerted effort needs to be made to ensure that all future digital radio sets can receive and decode all variants of Eureka 147. That is to say, get manufacturers producing sets that will receive all forms of digital radio.

- All services will be migrated from MW onto either DAB or FM.

For this to happen a timetable will need to be set, but:

- A precise timetable cannot yet be set, but a set of circumstances for that to happen should be layed out including trigger criteria

- The criteria should include the amount of DAB listening. Determining exactly what level this should be will be examined by the Group in the second half of this year, although it's likely to be around 50% (Currently it's around 11%, so there's a way to go).

- 2020 looks like the very latest date at which migration should have taken place.

- There must be "further consideration should be made of what mechanisms can encourage greater investment in new and high quality digital content. One such mechanism might be to allow greater economies of scale in the commercial sector by allowing for greater consolidation of ownership and coverage, particularly of local multiplexes, which in turn may free up investment for increasing coverage and more digital-only content."

And today, the BBC has published its response to Ofcom's Second Public Service Broadcasting Review. In a statement from Mark Thompson we get this:

"The challenges facing DAB: Some tough choices had to be made at the time of the BBC’s six year plan about the funding available for DAB. However, beyond its current commitments, the BBC could support a bold set of measures to develop DAB on behalf of the whole industry, including extending the coverage of the BBC’s national multiplex beyond 90% of the UK population; developing a plan for extending the coverage of the BBC’s Nations radio stations; and initiating a stronger marketing effort co-ordinated across the industry."

I suggest you go away and read, in particular, pages 38 and 39 of the PDF. I found the following especially interesting:

"Initiate a strong marketing effort co-ordinated across the industry, including active industry coordination to rebrand digital radio and by developing a national coverage database based on a single planning model made available online to the public (as for DTT / Freeview)."

If there were some substansive changes to how DAB is formulated - and we may yet see that - then this mightn't be a bad idea. Freeview has been very well marketed, and a similar pattern is now being adopted with Freesat.

So today is the start of Wimbledon, and as ever, the BBC has enormously comprehensive coverage. On digital TV they have the exceptional service that allows you to pick and choose which game you watch, and this is all replicated online (for UK users). Five Live and Five Live Sports Xtra have commentaries available throughout the fortnight - the main service hosted by the estimable Simon Mayo.

Then there's the official site which is run by IBM. There too you can listen to commentaries from Radio Wimbledon. It has three services this year (as previously noted, since they're broadcast locally on FM too) which are free to listen to online. You're also offered an even more comprehensive video service than that offered by the BBC (not that any significant match won't be broadcast by the Beeb), which costs subscribers £12.90 for an "all access" pass. Only a diehard would pay up for this surely, although the catch-up service might be worthwhile for some (at this stage it's not clear how many BBC games will be later available via the iPlayer).

All well and good. But then I had my weekly email from ITV.com with the following subject line: "Listen to Wimbledon live on itv.com!"

What? The BBC has a long-term deal in place, so what's ITV up to?

The HTML email that ITV.com send out doesn't render properly in Gmail, so I had to go exploring on ITV's website, and sure enough, if you click through to the Sport section you get this:

"Listen now to live Radio Wimbledon coverage direct from the Championships

"The grass has been cut, the lines have been painted, the strawberries are ripe and the sun is out (hopefully). It can only mean one thing... Wimbledon is back and this year you can follow it right here on itv.com

"Throughout the next fortnight you can keep up to date with all the twists and turns from SW19 with a choice of three radio commentaries direct from the Championships.

"You can choose to follow the top seeds with commentaries from Centre Court and Court Number One, while we've also got the best of the rest from the outside courts.

"Remember to turn your speakers on, turn them up - and enjoy!"

Essentially ITV.com is rebroadcasting the official Radio Wimbledon coverage. It doesn't launch neatly in a player like it does from the official Wimbledon site, but it's certainly there.

It's curious that ITV should enter into this arrangement. Tennis quite evidently isn't core to them - indeed it's impossible to actually think of a sport that's "more" BBC and "less" ITV than tennis, and Wimbledon in particular.

Of course there'll be a financial arrangement in place, and I'm sure that ITV.com will be happy with any additional pageviews. But you can't help think that the BBC might be a little miffed, and it's still an odd move.

[UPDATE] Media Guardain has the full story about this, seemingly last minute, deal struck between IMG on behalf of Wimbledon and ITV.com. I still find it slightly odd that non-exclusive audio that can also be found via the official Wimbledon website would generate such interest.

But the news release does explain one thing. It struck me that Wimbledon was putting an awful lot of effort into its radio offering by producing three radio streams seemingly for the website and some local RSLs. It seems that these are syndicated offerings made available to English language broadcasters throughout the world. Radio anorak that I am, I'd love to know where these services are being rebroadcast.

Mark Kermode of Five Live and The Culture Show has a great rant about Sex and the City, exposing it for the product placement-fest that it is. And product placement is only growing in films. It's long been accepted in the Bond films, but since The Matrix every blockbuster has done a mobile phone deal, and while Waynes World so memorably parodied the whole industry way back in 1992, the references are about as subtle in 2008 - look at Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk for starters.

Yesterday, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, spoke out against a proposal from the EU to allow product placement on British television:

Another test of standards that is coming round the corner is product placement. As you know the Government is obliged to consider this as part of the implementation of the new Audio Visual Media Services Directive.

I can see the arguments and benefits of product placement and understand why people feel it is an inevitability given the pressures they are under. But applying the same test, I can also see the cost and the very high costs that might be paid in the long term. I feel there is a risk that product placement exacerbates this decline in trust and contaminates our programmes. There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, that we elide the distinction between programmes and adverts.

As a viewer, I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director.

If Jim Royle gets out of his chair for a Kit Kat, I want to think, ‘he fancies a Kit Kat’ – not, ‘Kit Kat my arse!’

The full speech is here.

I'm not sure and have yet to be convinced by either side. The ITV view is that if it's done badly viewers will vote with their remotes. I'm not sure. Watch any number of US series and you'll see product placement already in place. Sometimes it's subtle - a lot of times it's not. And those blockbuster films I mentioned earlier are frankly embarrassing.

There's also the reality that props are supplied by agencies to producers free of charge. It keep the cost of set dressing down, but it might mean that your office is fitted out completely with Apples, or perhaps Dells. That might be realistic. But it might not.

TV broadcasters are going to need to look for different revenue streams having largely screwed themselves out of premium rate phone line revenues, and with spot airtime becoming ever easier to skip through. But they're really going to have to be careful if they want this to work.

There have been a couple of pieces recently wondering about why we're losing TV critics in our national newspapers. Ray Snoddy in Marketing magazine wrote about it last week following the ditching of daily TV reviews by the Daily Telegraph. He noted that the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have also ditched them. Now those latter two papers can do anything they like because I'm not likely to see them (even when I'm suckered into picking one up for a free DVD). But I'm surprised that the Telegraph has gone down this route.

Personally I find that the TV review column is one of the first I turn to when picking up a paper, and the column's loss would be akin to the removal of the crossword (something that wouldn't worry me, but I know would impact on sales overnight).

So why are they doing it. Well everyone whoops and chears if a drama gets 6 million viewers these days - mass audiences are not what they were, but 6 million is still a lot of people. As Radio Times editor Gill Hudson notes in a blog over at The Guardian, it's significantly higher than any newspaper's readership.

As others have noted, papers are happy to run reviews of classical music and theatre - activities that are far less popular.

I think it's actually a bad mistake on those newspapers' behalf to stop their TV columns.

It's true that some writing can become stale after a time. I got fed up in the end by Victor Lewis Smith in the Evening Standard. The facile jokes meant that I tended to join the review in paragraph two or three to skip them. But then he also reviewed programmes other than those provided by PR departments for that week. So if that meant a review of an hour of Ideal World, then so be it. And if something was good, he spoke up for it as well. I also dislike Sam Wollaston a lot of the time in The Guardian. He can be too much of a show-off far too often, and when he recently moaned that coming in at the start of series 4 of Battlestar Galactica was too confusing, I felt like throttling him. Having a complicated ongoing story is something to be applauded not moaned about. I'd also advise starting The Wire at episode one too. Finally on the moan list there's the appalling Kathryn Flett at The Observer. As a commentor on the Guardian's blog noticed, she doesn't seem to be writing her column for that newspaper's target audience.

But that's enough moaning. I like plenty of others. Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn is well worth a read even if he's likely to have a tendency to concentrate on tat like B*g B*****r. But he's happy to write about good programmes from time to time. Nancy Banks Smith is still great, and the Independent's reviewers remain good.

I think my defence for keeping reviewers is that TV is still incredibly important to a large proportion of the population. We spend over three and a half hours a day on average watching it according to BARB. Britain's Got Talent seemed to have a large proportion of the population held in rapture for a week or so recently, and the winners of anything from X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing or The Apprentice are devoured by reality TV obsessed media. So people do actually care about television.

Despite the advent of the internet, DVDs, video games and a plethora of other things fighting for your attention, people pretty much watch TV to the same extent as they did ten years ago.

Source: BARB

Of course a review of The Apprentice isn't the same as documentary on Early Music on BBC Four. But they're both important.

When I was younger, it used to confuse me that most TV reviews came out after the programme had aired. You'd not be able to watch the great show that the reviewer loved, but you might thank your lucky stars that you missed the one the reviewer hated. Either way, it was gone into the ether. There might be a repeat in a few months' time, but unless you knew someone who'd videoed it, you were out of luck.

These days programmes on digital channels tend to get multiple same week repeats, so if you missed the latest episode of Lost, you can catch up during another airing. And then there's the iPlayer and its equivalents. Missed an episode of The Apprentice? Watch it online and get up to date. You might have Sky+ed a show and not have watched it - the review may help you decide whether to bother watching it, or free up some space on your device and hit the delete key.

So why give up on them? I really don't know.

Some argue that anyone can comment on TV via their blogs or on forums. Well so they can. But they do the same with films, and I don't think anyone's rushing to dump their film reviewers. I can only think that it's snobbery that considers TV not one of the arts (it's instructive to look at newspaper websites or sections where TV is its own section and not part of the "Arts" section).

Well I can be the biggest snob in the world, but in this instance they've got it wrong, and I think it'll cost them sales in the long term.

As the sale of Virgin Radio nears completion, thoughts turn to the rebranding exercise to be carried out by Albion.

One of the most obvious, and spectacularly successful media rebrands of recent years was that of UK TV G2 into Dave which took place back in October 2007.

I wrote a piece on Dave's success back in December last year, where I thought it was particularly important to note that a major part of the new brands success, in my view came from it becoming available on Freeview. Adding close to 10 million new homes into the mix is always going to help. And with strong programming like Top Gear and QI repeats, that has helped it leap into the position it now finds itself.

Compare and contrast with Virgin1, another new channel launch from last year (launching 1st October 2007) which has also benefitted from being available on Freeview replacing the previous channel ftn.

Source: BARB

Note that I've not included their sister "+1" channels for which I don't have full data, and which don't broadcast on Freeview in any case. Also note that these share figures do include cable and satellite viewing and aren't solely Freeview, although I truly believe that Freeview availability is core to their success.

Although Dave's initial lustre is beginning to tarnish a little, it's still significantly stronger than it was at the start. It's no surpise that UK TV Gold is next to be relaunched with Richard & Judy signed up for a nightly 8pm show. Finding a Freeview slot will be critical though, as currently UK TV Gold is subscription only on Freeview boxes with programming available only through Top Up TV (there's not really a fully available channel space for it).

Virgin1 which launched a couple of weeks before Dave has benefitted from US acquisitions like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (how they must hate the US writers for going on strike and only producing nine episodes) and The Riches. They've also taken Star Trek programming away from Sky One. But their lack of UK programming is perhaps a factor is their relative performance compared with Dave. That said, there appears to be some growth there, and they've just gone widescreen which I think is vital for all significant non-terrestrial channels to use. Sci-Fi, I'm looking at you as possibly the most significant non-widescreen channel currently broadcasting, but Eurosport could do with it too - especially since they're in the process of going HD too.

But I digress. The key thing for both these channels' successes is not just stro