I was invited to present at the EBU conference Multimedia Meets Radio conference in Prague. More alert readers might realise that the EBU is a union of public service broadcasters and wonder why someone who works for a commercial radio station would present there. But we’re all radio services and there’s always plenty to learn about how others are doing things.
On the first day Mike Mullane, head of news, sport and new media at the EBU opened the conference by quoting some interesting statistics from a Canadian study that showed 62% of people agree that the radio influences their internet surfing. It’s all linked, and multimedia is an important part of any station’s armoury these days.
Vaclav Kasik of Czech Radio opened proceedings and detailed a few multimedia things that they’d done in the last few years. They’ve worked with a number of sets of animals including migrating storks (is this where BBC Radio 4’s bird tracking came from?), and famously The Revealed which began as a pastiche of reality shows like Big Brother, instead following a group of gorillas at Prague Zoo. But it grew beyond that and it’s become an educational tool with spin-off merchandise that’s sent money back to save the gorillas in their natural habitat. More recent projects have included oral histories and looks at the 1968 uprising.
We then heard from Steve Purdham of We7 the online music specialist. They offer an ad funded music service and he spoke about the early success that they’ve had since launch in the latter part of last year.
He talked about the various models that can be adopted to get the economics right: from free , via ad-funded, to a service strategy (e.g. Nokia’s Connect With Music) through to subscription and premium.
He also talked about the complexity of putting together the offerings. Peter Gabriel, the musician, is a part owner of the service and allowed his music to be included. Yet it took a total of 21 months from him giving permission to the music eventually reaching the site. This was a record company issue.
Jonas Woost of Last.fm also ran through his service showing us some of the functionality of their website that we were unaware of. I must admit that Last.fm is one of those sites that I really need to spend more time with. I know that all the excitement’s with Spotify at the moment, but then I’m lucky that my passsword’s not one of the ones that they lost recently.
A very impressive presentation then followed from MX3 who have positioned themselves as the home of Swiss music. They’ve managed to put agreements together that allows them to include all the best and biggest Swiss music on one service, even when the artists are signed to major labels.
Their service offers over 35,000 songs by nearly 11,000 artists. And the impressive technology that they have to access their service means that they’re currently serving 2TB of traffic a month. The technology that lets users embed widgets in all manner of websites and social networks is similarly impressive – in particular their cube. It’s some technology that’s really worth checking out, although I believe that it’s mostly blocked outside Switzerland.
DR Musik presented Karrierekanonen 2008 in which they tried to promote 50 unknown artists using some clever technology.
Steve Pratt of CBC in Canada gave one of the best presentations of the conference when he talked us through the success of Radio 3. It talked about how it basically went against all the standard “rules” of how to make a great radio station.
Indeed he said that they’d seemingly gone out to make “The Worst. Radio Station. Ever.”
They’d created a new format, played a wide variety of genres, had infrequent repetition, don’t broadcast on AM or FM, have their entire music library user-generated and don’t encumber their downloads with DRM. And there are some pretty big Canadian artists on the service like Arcade Fire and Feist.
He explained that they didn’t consider Radio 3 to be just a podcast or a website (it doesn’t have a traditional broadcast stream). They position themselves as experts in Canadian music. Radio 3 is defined by content and not by platform. Canadians have something of a low opinion of their own music, it seems – one that’s not shared outside the country. In the UK we actually listen to a fair few Canadian artists.
The whole of Radio 3 is from user generated content. There are about 75,000 songs.
What they do is ensure that they offer multiple formats ensuring that each platform, making use of the unique properties of each platform. Then they publish where the audience already is.
Mission Europe is an attempt to use radio to teach languagues. Radio France International, Deutsche Welle and Polskie Radio have joined together to produce 3 bilingual dramas in 4 versions each. These are in turn rebroadast by a network of further stations.
A really fascinating piece of technology was then demonstrated by WDR. The WDR Radiorecorder gets around the fact that rights issues mean that only a limited number of podcasts can be made available by stations. However, just as perhaps we once recorded radio shows to cassettes completely legally (unless we sold or passed on those tapes), the WDR Radiorecorder is a neat way of doing this.
It records on the user’s PC from the stream. But you can use EPG data to determine which programmes are recorded and when. It’s capable of recording more than one stream simultaneously, and it neatly incorporates the resulting mp3s into your iTunes library for syncing with your iPod or iPhone.
It really looks like an excellent product.
Vaclav Hradecky of Czech Radio spoke about how they’d used techniques such as online focus groups to test their services. And Tiziano Bonini of Rai Radio 2 spoke about Amnesia, a daily radio drama that presents life from the point of view of a 32 year old who’s forgotten everything. It’s presented as a “true story” but is a drama, and it’s backed up by a wealth of multimedia online. If I spoke Italian, I’d certainly download the podcast.
Brett Spencer from BBC Radio Five Live presented some videos demonstrating some of the excellent recent multimedia work that BBC Radio has done recently. This includes the visual radio version of Chris Moyles, as well as the excellent additional elements they included with Wimbledon last year.
Brett had to leave early and it was as well that he didn’t hear from Silvain Gire of Arte Radio. He explained that, “My religion forbids me to use PowerPoint.” And you won’t find much in the way of pictures on his website either. Gire has a very pure idea of what radio is, and it’s an auditory medium.
He’s lucky with the position he’s in: “We are completely free to do what I want…”
He talked about making a recent radio drama with the BBC – Deja Vu. As you’ll note from that link, beyond its iPlayer life, it’s no longer available. But a visit over to Arte reveals it’s there for download! (It’s a bilingual play).
“It took about a year to get the contracts agreed and as far as I know it’s still not signed.”
Mats Akerlund of Swedish Radio showed how they try to get podcasts into the mainstream including advertising on the metro system. They even placed boxes you could plug into to listen while you travelled. But what I thought was really clever was an app that asked how long your commute was and then recommended podcasts of a suitable duration.
Finally Jonathan Marks of Critical Distance gave us food for thought with a presentation about how radio is being used around the world. He was very dismissive of Asian Radio which he believes has really dumbed down and was now either non-stop music or rolling news. Without ebracing the editorial aspects of it (Ireland, Denmark and Catalonia were cited), radio will die.
He talked about small radio stations in West Africa which use SMS networks to pass on harvesting details, and how the stations partner with mobile phone providers to share costs and keep both masts and antennas running. He talked about how your SIM card is your identity. If you don’t have a bank account you can receive payment in airtime, which can later be exchanged back for cash.
He talked about a service that a radio station in Ghana offers allowing listeners to use SMS to check whether drugs they’re being sold are real or fake – something that’s a major issue there.
In another case he talked about a distance learning station that he was trying to get to archive its output. The station only goes on air when the teachers arrive, and using RFID chips, it can power up the station and now start recording their programme. By cleverly getting the first sentences to summarise the programme’s subject matter, archiving is possible (recalcitrant professors are told they won’t be paid unless they do this!).
From a wider perspective he said that DRM = Doesn’t Really Matter. But Africa won’t be going digital anytime soon until models under 10 Euro are on the market.
All in all, some very interesting ideas presented over a day and a half and read what James Cridland had to say on procedings here and here.
I suppose that if there’s one thing I took away from this conference – it’s that everyone’s doing an iPhone app. They’re all very smart and lovely, but I do wonder where the S60 apps (for Nokias) and Windows Media or Sony Ericsson apps are? Last time I checked, slightly more people are using these phones that Apple’s one phone from one carrier solution.