In this week’s Broadcast magazine, Emily Bell suggests that it’d be a good idea for there to be a one-stop shop for audio. She’s referring, of course, to Tim Davie’s interview with Media Guardian on Monday suggesting that the BBC works with commercial radio to build a single “radioplayer.”
“I’m talking about getting radio fit for the on-demand digital age. Why shouldn’t we be able to live pause, put it on hard drive, grab stuff from the past seven days and pre-book on radio as well as TV,” he says.
That’s all pretty exciting, and there are some interesting ideas there. A core technology backbone for all radio offerings would be a good idea.
But a single radio player?
The problem is that he’s coming at it from the point of view of a public broadcaster who’s job is simply to get the Corporation’s audio out to as many people as possible. But while that might be a major aim for commercial operators who also want their radio to be heard by as many people as possible, their prime aim is to make money via the medium. If one can’t be done with the other, then it’s not a solution.
And websites make money for radio stations – groups have digital sales teams. Once upon a time, a radio station’s website might effectively have been classed as a line on the marketing budget. But no longer.
Commercial radio stations quite like it when stations listen to their service online via their own website. That’s why you’ll hear presenters drive listeners to stations’ websites to interact, watch videos, enter competitions, find out more and so on.
Websites’ radio players can also do smart things like be “skinned” by advertisers, have video or audio pre-rolls, and provide links to other popular fare like videos or social networking tools.
The idea that a listener instead goes to a generic ‘www.radioplayer.co.uk’ and goes direct to the stream is not something that’s obviously commercially workable.
In her piece, Bell notes that we all go to YouTube for video. Most providers, even if they initially held firm, end up putting something on YouTube and hope that viewers come back to their sites for more. Thus the BBC put clips up and so on. But that’s also the reason that Comedy Central in the US, for example, gets you to go to its own site for clips of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. It’s all there and embeddable (indeed embedding clips is about the only way of watching outside the US), but those page impressions drive advertising direct to the producers.
I know that a viewer might prefer it if if they went to one place – a bit like their digital TV service’s EPG to get programming. And maybe one day, individual station websites will seem as quaint as stations sending out magazines at regular intervals to members. Hastening their demise doesn’t really help in the medium term. Not when it’s the one certain revenue growth area in any media.
For some providers, of course, the idea might be good. The Guardian produces a lot of excellent programming, and would probably quite like to have The Guardian Daily show up in the same player that houses The Today Programme, have Media Talk sit alongside The Media Show, or Football Weekly somewhere in the vicinity of Five Live.
But even The Guardian might be concerned if it started to have an overall impact on page impressions of their otherwise very popular main site. Audio and video, to The Guardian, are not core components – they’re nice extras that they’re trying to grow.
Newspapers have had a difficult time with Google News, but most at least are clear that the page views are returned to the individual papers with their stories. That said, is The Guardian or The Times really comfortable with the fact that some (potential) readers head to www.google.co.uk/news rather than www.guardian.co.uk or www.timesonline.co.uk for their news needs?
At the moment, if someone wants to listen to Absolute Radio, they visit our website, and they aren’t tempted by Xfm or 6 Music sitting just alongside.
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but some very careful thought has to be put into how such ideas might work. Sharing some of the knowledge that the BBC has built up, and the developments it has made seems very sensible. The idea that I could set something to record a radio programme for me ahead of time is very interesting. And if I listen via a WiFi radio, then of course I’m not going to be visiting anybody’s website and it’s all moot anyway.
But in the current tough climate, radio groups are going to be ever more reliant on additional revenues generated away from simple spot airtime, and that means digital revenues. Anything that damages them is not going to be welcomed with open arms.
More on this from Matt, earlier in the week.
[As ever, these views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer]