BBC Radio 1 is running a week long trial of a beta visualisation version of the radio player for a couple of programmes this week.
I only caught a few minutes of Moyles this morning, but it seemed to work very well, and was a very interesting experiment in what can and can’t be done.
You can read more about it here. But I’ll share a few of my initial thoughts.
The in-studio webcams which stream live video are good… to a point. The quality is high, and they seem to cut around quite intelligently. I’d love to know if the vision mixing between cameras is being done automatically (via some kind of cleverness that measures which mics have significant levels of sound coming through them, and then prioritising the cameras pointing at those mics) or, more likely, being done by a vision mixer.
I’m sure that in time, more information about the now playing artists could be incorporated into the system. At the moment it looks at Wikipedia, but there must be loads of information about most of these artists on bbc.co.uk already.
The infographic visualisations of various votes are excellent, although I suspect that the swingometer for beer or wine must have been pre-determined. Or maybe there’s a graphic artist on hand to knock up quick beer and wine glasses should the Chris Moyles show require them. Although the system has clearly designed to be able to cope with the needs of live radio, it’d be interesting to learn just how spontaneous it really is.
Displaying text messages is also done very well. Commercial operators who make money from texts might want to take special note as this surely encourages shared discussions. Is there room for Twitter in any of this? I’m pretty sure that messages and being manually screened rather than just using an automated filtering system – although both might be in place – before they appear.
Earlier, I said the webcams were good “to a point.” Technically they were excellent with high quality streams in sync with the audio. And it’s fun looking inside the studio. I’m told that at Absoltue Radio, searches for our webcams are high – people want to see what’s going on in the studio.
Yet when all’s said and done, it’s a bit dull after a while isn’t it? I think these cameras really come into their own when you have stars or other guests in the studio. Although whether radio studios will need wardrobe and make-up departments is an interesting question in the longer term (I’ve not seen any make-up artists do their stuff with bands that have played at Absolute Radio, but given the propensity of videoing sets rather than just recording audio, this can’t be far off). Closer to home, the Tim Shaw show would be an interesting case to try something similar with.
It’s interesting that the BBC has chosen the Chris Moyles show as the highest profile programme on the service to test visualisation. He obviously has plenty of appropriate material – but I just know that I’d never get around to logging onto a PC first thing in the morning to “see” what’s going on. That’s why I listen to the radio in the morning rather than watch TV.
I’ll be tuning in again to see how it’s used.