Author Archives: mhill

Radioplayer’s been nominated in the prestigious New Media Age awards. These awards, now in their 16th year, celebrate excellence in digital and interactive work, and focus on projects which deliver tangible benefits to business. 

We’re nominated in the ‘Media’ category, alongside huge brands like Google, Microsoft, and BSkyB (no competition, then). The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London on June 28th. Fingers crossed!

Here’s a link to the full shortlist in all categories. http://www.nmaawards.co.uk/shortlist.aspx

It’s nearly a year since Radioplayer launched in the UK, and we’re in Barcelona, for the annual ‘Radiodays’ conference. We’re doing a session about our first year, what it’s taught us, where we’ve got to, and where we might be headed next.

I’ll try to get the presentation uploaded here, but for the time being, here’s the press release we’re sending out today, marking our first anniversary, and announcing some next steps.

Radioplayer 1st anniversary – RDE – final

We’re looking for an Operations Manager to help us run Radioplayer.

Download the details here.

Although to some people it seems like a strange thing to do, official ‘RAJAR’ figures show that nearly 5% of all radio listening is done through a TV. At the moment, the main way people find radio on their TV is by scrolling down the huge list of channels in the electronic programme guide. Lurking right down the bottom, usually beyond Home Shopping, God, and Dating, are a few dozen radio stations.

Ask anyone in the media business, and they’ll tell you that 2012 is likely to be the year of ‘connected TVs’. They’re referring to the trend for people to buy tellies that can hook up to your wi-fi and give you stuff not only from your TV aerial/satellite/cable connection, but also through the internet. And apparently we’re increasingly connecting things to our TVs that are themselves connected to the internet – like set-top boxes, games consoles and Blu-ray players.

This opens up a few interesting possibilities for Radioplayer….

1) As TVs get more user-friendly, we should be able to make Radio easier to find. Ideally, under one button.
2) Instead of just a few dozen stations, we should be able to offer listeners more choice (there are now 307 stations in Radioplayer).
3) And while you’re listening, we could show you more interesting/useful stuff on your screen, using the internet connection.

So, we’re looking to work with a company that has experience in this ‘connected TV app’ area. Today, we’re kicking off a very fast selection process, which starts with a ‘Request for Expressions of Interest’. If you’re a firm with the right expertise, you can download the details here.

It’s been a big day for Radioplayer. We’ve just hit the 300-station mark, and launched two new apps.

300 is a milestone because it’s roughly double the number of stations we launched with in the Spring. But more importantly, the last few months have seen dozens of commercial, student, community, and hospital stations using the simple ‘DIY’ tool-kit we developed. And we’ve run a successful series of ‘surgeries’ to help them create their own bespoke consoles.

‘Splash FM’, which became our 300th station today, is a great example of a relatively small commercial radio group seeing the advantages of joining Radioplayer. It’s a ‘level playing-field’, which puts them one click away from the biggest stations in the UK, and millions of potential listeners.

It also enables them to take advantage of the innovative development we’re doing on behalf of the whole industry. Our new apps are good examples of this. They’re designed to capitalise on the fact that we now have hundreds of stations and thousands of programmes in a common interface, by putting radio right under people’s noses.

The first, based on ‘Adobe AIR’, installs a radio in your PC, Mac or Linux computer and puts an icon in your ‘Start’ menu. The app launches Radioplayer with just one click, even without a browser open. It behaves exactly like a radio, opening at the last station you listened to. It was built by a clever developer in Cornwall, called Robin Wilding.

The second app puts a Radioplayer button prominently at the top of Google’s popular ‘Chrome’ browser, just one click away. That was the brainchild of ‘radio futurologist’ James Cridland. Both these new apps join the existing Radioplayer Facebook app (made by the folks at Folder Media) on our new apps page. Download them and give them a go – and watch out for more stations, and more innovation, over the coming months.

A quick note about a potentially exciting development for UK Radioplayer. We’ve had a fair amount of international interest in what we’re doing here in the UK – which isn’t surprising, as in many ways we’re breaking new ground, with our evolution of radio on connected devices. 

This has prompted enquiries about how other countries could adopt similar models – which would be beneficial for the digital radio landscape around the world, as it could lead to a harmonisation of standards and approaches. 

In keeping with the spirit of partnership which led to its inception, UK Radioplayer Ltd (the not-for-profit company set up to run and develop Radioplayer) is asking for ‘Expressions of Interest’ from anyone who’s interested in working together, to explore the international opportunities. 

There are details in the document you can download below. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any further information.

Radioplayer – request for expressions of interest

A quick post to point out two relatively subtle, but significant, features we’ve launched today. These may be mostly of interest to developers.

We wanted to offer first-time users of Radioplayer a quick guide to its main features. This is in response to questions from users about how to save their favourites in ‘My Stations’, and how to use the main controls. So from today, if you click ‘listen’ on our website, and we detect that you haven’t listened to a Radioplayer station yet, you get a short video tour, delivered in a specially adapted Radioplayer console. If we think you have visited Radioplayer before, the player opens at the last station you listened to – just like a radio. You can preview the video tour using the button below (whether you’ve visited before or not). 

And we’ve been getting questions from websites and radio stations about how best to link to Radioplayer. So we’ve built a neat little ‘button generator’, which  creates a button that pops the correctly-sized window for Radioplayer. You can choose whether the button should launch a specific station, or act like a radio (opening at the station the user last played, or the video introduction if it’s their first visit). This is the start of our plans to spread radio across the web, and make it easier to ‘stumble across’ great programmes and stations. You can find it here.

Both these features have been built by the folks at Folder Media, but are very much the product of the collaborative development style we’re adopting at Radioplayer. Here’s a short fly-on-the-wall video of a collaborative workshop we organised recently, attended by 25 developers and designers from across the radio industry. There are more to come – stay tuned.

Want to say congrats on your website. Never heard of you until my local station was added. A message from one of the 5.7m recent adopters of Radioplayer as a simple, consistent way of listening to the best of UK Radio on your computer. But we’re often asked – how are we going to get the message out to people who haven’t discovered it yet? That was one of the many questions posed on this week’s ‘Radiotalk’ podcast, hosted by Trevor Dann. 

The answer is, through a mixture of well-targeted digital campaigns, promotion across our member stations, clever links and widgets on third-party websites, and  – the best marketing tool of all – word of mouth. Here’s an example of the first of those – our online launch campaign, shown as a series of banner ‘frames’ .

Radioplayer banner sequence

It ran on a range of news and entertainment sites including The Guardian, Metro, MSN, Yahoo, Channel 4, YouTube, and MTV. A simple sequence of messages, resolving in a ‘now playing’ panel, which the user clicked to ‘pop’ that station’s Radioplayer. This reached an estimated 9 million potential users across a 5-week period. 

There have been some notable examples of great Radioplayer promotion so far, from Absolute Radio, the BBC (who are currently running a month-long campaign across all their stations), and Smooth Radio, who kindly helped us make a series of trails which can be run by any Radioplayer station across the UK. Here’s a selection of those – and we’d love to hear any other great examples of radio stations explaining Radioplayer to their listeners.

Yesterday was a good day for Radioplayer. We announced our first official listening figures (more on that in a minute), but more importantly, we started delivering on our promise to help stations of all sizes join Radioplayer.

Community station Gaydio, and student stations Crush and URY all managed to create great-looking Radioplayer consoles of their own, and are now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the biggest brands in UK Radio. Crush and URY were both guinea-pigs for a new  ‘self-service’ tool we’re launching, which will help smaller stations build their own versions of Radioplayer to the same standards as the rest of the industry. If you’re involved with a small commercial, community or student station, drop us a line through the ‘contact’ page, and we’ll talk you through how to get into Radioplayer.  

Back to those figures  – we’ve discovered that an amazing 5.7 million people listened via Radioplayer across the last 4 weeks.  Rewind a few months, to when we demonstrated the first ‘alpha’ version featuring just 5 stations, and that sort of figure seemed a long way off. So many questions remained to be answered -

Could a user switch seamlessly between hundreds of separate players – and feel like they were in one product?  How long would it take them to get into the habit of using the search engine, and saving their favourite stations? Can Radioplayer really help the whole industry – including small commercial, community, and student stations?

We’re now in a position to start answering some of those questions and we’ve begun to draw some early (if fairly impressionistic) conclusions about how people seem to be using Radioplayer. 

5.7 million unique users listened via Radioplayer across a 4-week period 

22.5 million Radioplayer consoles were launched or switched by those users 

We’ve grown from 157 stations 8 weeks ago, to 238 – with many more to come 

About 20% of Radioplayer users seem to be sampling more than one station 

 We’re right at the start of what will be a very long game – so we’ll come back with more updates as we see clearer trends. As I said at the start, our priority right now is to grow the Radioplayer network, to include every Ofcom-licensed station that wants to join.  Drop us a message if you have any questions, or if you want to be added to the list. 

The Radioplayer search engine has sparked a lot of interest across the radio industry. We’re working with one of the biggest search firms in the business, Autonomy, to develop a search experience that’s right for radio.

It takes into account not only the ‘editorial relevance’ of the search term that’s entered, but also a sense of ‘now-ness’ (happening right now, about to happen, or just happened), and location (based on a place name or postcode in the search query). These factors are important to the medium of radio.

It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be refining it over coming weeks in response to user feedback, and the actual terms people are searching for. We’re still developing the means to analyse the huge volume of searches taking place across the Radioplayer network, so it’ll be a while before we can share detailed search stats.

But in the meantime, here’s an impressionistic snapshot of the most commonly-searched individual words and numbers across a few days. The relative sizes of the terms  are broadly indicative of the number of times they were entered (but only very broadly). It’s in the form of a ‘Wordle’.