James Cridland - radio futurologist

I'm at https://james.crid.land

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

It's 40 years since Trevor Horn wrote this song

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Radio TOK FM is one of the most listened-to radio stations in Warsaw, Poland, owned by Agora Radio Group. A news and talk station with over 40 journalists, the station is doing something unusual: charging for podcasts.

Jarosław Śliżewski, the company’s Chief Digital Officer, says that six years ago, a decision was made to focus on on-demand content. Now, listeners pay a monthly fee to gain access to over 65,000 pieces of on-demand audio from the station, including catch-up shows and exclusive digital-only content.

Pricing is set at US$3.90 a month for access via the web, though over half of their subscribers pay US$5.20 which gives access on mobile apps, too. (That’s the same as Spotify charges in Poland, incidentally).

The company already has more than 17,000 paying subscribers - a figure that has grown 60% year-on-year.

“Every day, we produce about nineteen hours of new content for radio broadcast,” Jarosław tells me. “Additionally, about two hours a day is produced exclusively for online use, like bespoke podcasts or extended versions of live programmes”. Some of the original podcasts are broadcast on the radio, too.

They work hard on the service’s metadata, with all content described and tagged, and about 40% of the content is automatically transcribed (thanks to a Google DNI grant). The app contains personalisation, as well as playlists; you can “follow” specific topics, presenters and programmes.

While the station is present on Apple Podcasts and other similar platforms, they use these as marketing material, containing clips of the full content that is only available through the paid-for service.

Podcasting, and on-demand content, is clearly growing; and the growth in Radio TOK FM’s paying users since 2013 has been steady. “Digital income is becoming a more significant component of TOK FM’s profits,” Jarosław adds.

Radio’s future certainly looks like a mix of live and on-demand content; and perhaps Radio TOK FM is leading the way.

Support the show.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

In Canada recently, I heard a little bit of history - or, so it seemed to me. Radio executives were openly banging the drum for FM chips in phones: an argument I thought was long since dead.

You can understand why this discussion is still live in Canada. Some research I did about mobile phone data costs seems to point to Canada being exceptionally expensive for mobile data. In comparison to Australia (roughly the same population and land mass), Canadians pay almost FIVE TIMES MORE for a monthly plan that gives a THIRD LESS DATA. (I put this in capital letters because it still surprises me).

Perhaps Canadian radio broadcasters sense an opportunity if FM chips are enabled. I’m not sure there is one, to be honest.

As devices, mobile phones already significantly underperform when it comes to live, linear radio (whether streamed or delivered via FM). Research of UK radio listeners, on page 10 of this PDF, appears to show live radio accounting for less than 20% of all audio consumed on a phone. The most interactive device that we own, always within arm’s reach, is not the most ideal device for listening to an unpersonalised live stream, it would seem.

It’s also not a great user experience. There are no logos and virtually no metadata when listening to FM radio (and in Canada, like the US and Australia, even RDS signals are exotic in many markets). The very action of tuning into a radio station requires the listener to remember a random number for no reason other than a historical anachronism. The company that got closest to fixing the user experience on mobile, Emmis's NextRadio, wasn't supported by other parts of the North American radio industry, and regrettably has joined Nokia's Visual Radio in the waste bin of good ideas.

“But radio is most important in times of emergency”, claim the radio companies. But in reality, if an emergency, or a big news story, happens in the evenings or weekends, recent evidence suggests radio won’t cover it anyway. SMS and app alerts are much more effective at communicating immediate peril, like weather events or fire. If radio had a part to play here once, it doesn’t any more. (The aftermath from emergency, as a community starts putting things together? That’s a very different thing, where radio excels.)

In any case, the technology is against it. The antenna used for FM or DAB+ reception in a mobile phone is the headphone cable: but that’s something that doesn’t exist in Apple or high-end Google phones, which use Bluetooth. Bluetooth headphones are a challenge with electronic measurement, too. And the strong AM stations that exist in Canadian metro areas? There’s only ever been one mobile phone with AM built-in, and the reason you don’t know about it is that it was fifteen years ago, and it was rubbish.

There’s plenty of evidence that Canadian listeners use streaming rather less than their neighbours in the US. The Canadian radio companies could lean on the CRTC to more effectively regulate the price of mobile data from the cellular networks. But they won’t, because the Canadian radio companies ARE the cellular networks.

Indeed, the cellular networks are the folks calling the shots in terms of whether FM chips are enabled or not. If the Canadian cellular networks aren’t pressuring the likes of Google and Apple for FM chips to be enabled - and let me remind you again, they own the FM radio networks - that points to a bigger issue.

Let’s use our energy and focus on delighting our audience, not trying to capture a magic unicorn that offers, at...

Television, as we know, is changing rapidly - significantly more so than radio. Viewers to live TV are declining, as audiences get more used to on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, Stan, or iPlayer. So, TV platforms are trying new things.

At the beginning of this year, the TV system that I subscribe to - a little Australian set-top-box called Fetch TV - added a new channel. It’s a true-crime channel called Oxygen, run by NBC Universal, and it’s on channel 101.

Oxygen is an interesting model - because it isn’t actually a television channel at all.

Sure, it looks like a television channel. It appears in the EPG alongside all the other television channels, and it has a broadcast schedule, too, 24-hours a day. If I flick through the channels in an evening, I’ll flick past Oxygen just like every other channel. You can watch it just like any other channel - you can watch a show, then the show finishes, then something else will start.

In fact, Oxygen is just a collection of on-demand TV shows. On the TV Guide, it exists as a virtual channel - the EPG slot there to promote the shows available on-demand. When you channel-surf into Oxygen, it isn’t giving you a live TV channel at all - in fact, the show conveniently starts at the beginning. It’s an on-demand service - not a live TV channel. Programming has been chosen based on how well it’ll perform as an on-demand product.

What could radio learn from this?

Imagine - you tune into the radio, and the first thing you hear is your favourite song. Followed by, yes, the live presenters (at least, recorded live five minutes ago). A radio station that gives you the travel at 8.20am and only at 8.20am, because that’s the time you’re just getting ready to drive into work. A radio station that has everything that makes great radio - presenters talking about the football last night, the ride into town today; but a radio station that has nothing that makes for bad radio - no poorly-targeted advertising, no overplaying of my favourite songs.

If we were to think of great music radio as a jigsaw, made from short pieces of on-demand audio content, rather than a live unalterable stream - what would that mean?

That “jigsaw” could be assembled just for me, on my mobile phone. And for you, on yours. And a version of that jigsaw also assembled for those listening on FM - with less of the personalisation, but otherwise should sound virtually identical.

Is the future for radio something which is devised as a collection of on-demand audio, assembled for each listener... and where the FM transmitter is just another listener?

Does radio need a bit of Oxygen?

Support the show.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy