Thoughts on MMR09
Canadian Broadcasting set the theme for this year’s Multimedia Meets Radio conference in Prague. CBC’s Steve Pratt says the flaw of traditional radio is that it simply tells you to shut up and listen. Nearly everything on display at the EBU event was fighting against that.
Swedish Radio asks people how long their commute is and then suggests podcasts that fit the time. WDR in Germany, with no iPlayer equivalent, gets listeners to record programmes themselves.
The radio ¬recorder is downloaded from the website and then offers an EPG. You can pick the programmes you want and it drops them into your iTunes. It’s clever but seems to ask a lot of the listener.
I spoke in the multiplatform section, showing off Radio 1’s visualisation trial around Switch and Chris Moyles, as well as 5 Live’s interactive offering for Wimbledon. There was a lot of interest in the 5 Live football player widget which is now embedded in fans’ sites and social networks on the web.
Much of the event focused on music. Steve Purdham, Peter Gabriel’s partner in the online music directory WE7, and Jonas Woost from Last FM showed digital music business models that are changing the way listeners are consuming music.
Purdham insists that collaboration and participation are the future of music online.
But how do new artists get a foot in the digital door? Danish Radio’s Lars Henrik Muller said that launching new artists online can seem like selling sand in the Sahara.
Dominic Born spoke about the Swiss service MX3. This lets bands upload songs and listeners to get widgets to listen to them. Interestingly it’s not just for one broadcaster but for several across Switzerland – an interesting idea for us perhaps, building on the success of BBC Introducing.
Steve Pratt is a very clever man. He claims to have built the worst radio station in the world. Music you have never heard picked by people you don’t know. I might need to explain that.
CBC3 in Canada, like MX3, allows bands to upload their music and then gives you a player to listen to them on. But it has almost single handedly helped to preserve Canadian music with many artists like Arcade Fire and Feist receiving early exposure here.
Users can download podcasts, get recommendations and make their own playlists. But what is significant here for a public service broadcaster, is that there isn’t a linear stream, CBC3 being an entirely digital ¬offering available in a variety of forms online.
Consultant Jonathan Marks developed the non-linear theme declaring that younger listeners are not interested in broadcaster websites because they ‘look finished’. He has been developing interactivity with radio stations in Africa.
One in Benin staged a phone poll by giving out two mobile numbers. The winner was the mobile with the most missed calls. I might try that just to see what the compliance is like...
See also James Cridland
posted by MMR at
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Steve Pratt, Director, 
