Photo: A.M. Kuchling

An update from Michael Hill, MD of Radioplayer

There are some arbitrary milestones we set ourselves in life, and we’ve just passed one of mine in the latest set of RAJAR listening figures, out today. It’s the first time online radio consumption has caught up with listening through digital television (Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media etc).

This moment seemed a long way off when we first started talking about improving listening on ‘connected’ devices like computers. Back in 2010, online was languishing at about 2.8% of all radio listening, and digital TV was at about 4.4%.

Now, we’re neck-and-neck, with each platform delivering 5% of all listening. This still leaves huge room for improvement, but it’s prompted me to look back at where we’ve come from, let you know what we’re up to this summer, and give you an idea of where we’re headed after that.

‘It just works!’

That was our target when we launched the first shared Radioplayer interface, for desktop machines. We wanted to make it as simple to play your favourite station on a computer, as it is on a radio. That consistent reliability has helped us attract 6-7 million unique users a month, and to grow online listening hours by 33%*, and online listening share by 38%*, since we launched.

‘Spoilt for choice!’

Once we’d got UK Radio in one place, we built some mobile apps, to help people discover the fantastic range of that radio. These free apps (for iOS, Android, and Kindle) make clever recommendations to help you find stations and shows – based on where you are, what else you’ve listened to, what’s trending right now, and what music you love.

And this summer, brand new versions of our apps are coming to tablets too – iPads and Android. We think these devices will make impressive radios. They’ve got lovely big screens, many have decent speakers, and they’re often used in the home, on wi-fi connections. These apps will be our best work to date, and they’ll make great showcases for UK Radio – particularly some of the brilliant new digital stations.

Also this summer, a major upgrade of our web player console, for all Radioplayer stations. It’ll play on non-Flash devices like iPads, and every part of the interface will be improved – including search, favourites, and ‘now playing’ information. For our commercial stations, there’ll also be a range of audio/video/display formats built in, which they can choose to switch on if they want to increase revenue from the digital traffic they’re now attracting.

‘Blimey, that’s clever!’

And beyond that, we’re doing some seriously challenging work integrating radio apps into car dashboards,  building better digital radios (which automatically find the stations and programmes you want, regardless of how they’re being broadcast), and working across the industry to help define the future of radio.

It’s a future that’s never looked brighter – and it’ll be powered by partnerships. Thanks to the BBC, Global, Absolute, Real/Smooth, RadioCentre, and our hundreds of friends across UK Radio and the world, for helping us get this far.

* RAJAR audience data Q1 2013 vs Q1 2011

A few weeks ago I helped organise something called Webview Week for the UK Radioplayer.

It’s the second coder’s event we’ve had at Radioplayer. The first was a day around what a mobile app might look like: UX and design specialists from across our partners in the radio industry came up with some unexpected and interesting ideas, which – in part – led to the success of the current Radioplayer app on Android, iPhone and Kindle Fire.

Webview Week, as the name might suggest, was a concentrated week of coding for radio stations on their webview inside the Radioplayer app. The webview is the station-specific portion of the app that appears when you tune in: for some stations, like Heart, Capital or Absolute as an example, it’s a bespoke view with information and branding; but others had left the app to use a default view which – containing a logo and a piece of text – is slightly less interesting.

Visuals for radio are vital for the future of the medium. Today’s younger generation have grown up with colour screens on everything, and to them music has always been ‘visualised’, whether on music television or YouTube. Visuals help brand recall – vital for RAJAR and advertisers alike. So Radioplayer felt it important to ensure that radio inside the Radioplayer mobile app looks great, as well as sounds great.

Recognising that stations might have to fit this work in with other things, and appreciative that not all media companies are based in London town, the event was a mostly virtual one. Using GoTo Meeting (thank you, RadioDNS, for your help with this), we met virtually on the Monday, and highlighted some of the opportunities that the Radioplayer’s JavaScript Bridge offers a developer. Then, we shared APIs, documentation and a few development apps for iOS and Android via BaseCamp, a collaborative system that allowed us to offer help during the week.

On Friday, those that had taken part mostly met in London (with URY taking part from their studios in York), to show and tell what they’d done. Michael Hill, Radioplayer’s Managing Director, was on hand to see what people had come up with, and with a credit card for a pub afterwards. (The Angel, if you wondered: a Sam Smith’s pub with “man in the box” on tap).

The afternoon was eye-opening. The Radioplayer JavaScript Bridge, a nifty piece of code that enables webviews to communicate directly with the app itself, was intended to be used for some simple controls and to communicate information to the webview (like what song is playing, as one example). But the use that it had been put to was fascinating.

Folder Media, the operator of digital station Fun Kids, had used the code to produce an impressive and very graphical interface for their listeners – and, also, to ensure a high amount of statistics to help the station understand when and how people tune in, and what they do when they listen. They’d integrated their bespoke Radiobase system into the webview, to ensure that it automatically pulled things in from their website for display in the app: even videos.

Lincoln’s community station Siren FM had used the JavaScript Bridge for relevant messages to the listener, at a time they might respond. Once they’d been listening for twenty minutes, for example, a listener might be gently nudged to make the station a favourite – if, of course, they’d not already done so. They, too, had also integrated information from their content management system, the ever-popular WordPress.

The BBC had taken the opportunity to simplify their webviews for users: trialling a clearer and smarter interface that focused on the current on-air experience. This should lead thinking of their webview development later in the year. UBC, the technical team behind many of Radioplayer’s systems, had worked on the default webview, to make it a clearer and more informative experience for both live and on-demand listening, including links to discover more; and RaW also worked on their own website.

And there were more stations and services, too; from RaW, UCB, and Media UK. (I didn’t do very well in the end: but did manage to produce a proof of concept using Remy Sharp’s twitter.js, pulling in station Twitter feeds.

We’ve learnt that a service like BaseCamp was very helpful to people to help them develop; and we’re looking at the possibility of doing something similar on a permanent basis – and we’ve also learnt that passionate, creative developers make some pretty surprising things. We also learnt that the BBC prefers Taddy Porter, the Radioplayer team like Soverign Bitter, and at least one of the students went for cider. Fruit-based drinks aside, it was a really interesting week, and one we hope to do again.

Jonathan Cresswell from Siren FM has also blogged about the webview week

James Cridland is Radio Futurologist and Managing Director at Media UK.

But collaboration doesn’t just help to achieve consistency. It’s actually the most effective way of working. ‘We are humans because we are able to co-operate’ says Howard Rheingold, an expert on collaborative innovation. Here he is, speaking to the ‘Spark’ programme on CBC Radio, about the value of working together.  

We love getting brilliant people together in a room, to help us make Radioplayer better. So we’re going to run another ‘hack’ event – this time aimed at improving our new mobile apps – available on iPhones, Android, and Kindle Fire (just search ‘radioplayer’ in the Amazon Kindle store). 

We’ve deliberately built a ‘blank canvas’ into our apps, to encourage innovation and competition. Once a user chooses a station and it starts playing, that station is able to display whatever they want, via a ‘web-view’. Into that blank canvas, stations can push images, videos, text, tweets, adverts – the sky’s the limit. And it’s really easy to do, as it’s basically a web page – so we can experiment, share ideas, and help all our stations improve. 

Some are already using it to great effect – here’s a selection of the best examples from Capital, Absolute, Juice Brighton, and Smooth. But what would YOU like to see in this space? If you work at one of our 350 member stations, look out for emails about how to get involved, and innovate in your own web-view.

And if you just want to chuck a great idea into the collaborative pot, you can always drop us a line at contact@radioplayer.co.uk.

In November, at the annual Radio Festival in Manchester, we demonstrated a prototype ‘concept radio’ interface we’ve been working on. We now have a short video of the radio in action, which you can watch here.

It’s another example of collaboration across the industry – the ‘RadioDNS’ station-switching code was written by the brilliant ‘creative technology’ team at Global, the guys at Absolute helped with the design of the interface, and the folks at TUI Interactive made it all work together.

Here are some details, along with some shots of the prototype working. We’re already talking to leading manufacturers about how to take the prototype to the next stage and we hope this will help act as a catalyst for debate and innovation across the radio industry.

The prototype features a simple colour touch-screen interface with large bright station logos acting as ‘presets’; ‘now playing’ information appearing with a tap of the finger and a large canvas available for stations to populate with ‘slide-show’-style visuals. 

The radio automatically selects the strongest broadcast signal for each station, switching to an internet stream if the broadcast signal deteriorates. This process is transparent to the user and is powered by ‘RadioDNS’, another industry collaboration which aims to act as the hybrid ‘glue’ between broadcast radio and the Internet.

Radioplayer, the non-profit partnership between the BBC and commercial radio, has already launched a common interface for internet listening via desktop and mobile apps, and hopes to bring Radioplayer to the ‘kitchen radio’ too.  

Michael Hill, Managing Director of Radioplayer said: “The future of radio isn’t FM or DAB or Internet – it’s all of them, working together seamlessly. But that doesn’t mean radios have to be complicated. We built this prototype to show that they can be powerful AND simple”.

We want Radioplayer to be the most reliable multi-channel radio app in the market. To achieve that, we obviously have to help the industry make their online radio streams play reliably on phones. So we’ve done a bit of digging on the topic of mobile data. 

A user can be on a variety of mobile connections, depending on where they are, and how congested the network is. But what are the main differences between these connections, how often is a typical user on each, and what does that mean for radio streaming? 

1) Wi-fi connections are the fattest ‘phone pipes’, delivering about 5 megabits per second on average, and 3G typically at least 1 megabit per second. These are both capable of delivering high-quality radio streams to mobiles. 

2) However, when on the move, handsets are only on 3G connections about 60% of the time, according to crowd-sourced data. The BBC conducted a similar experiment, which appears to reinforce this finding. 

3) So, during the 40% of the time that your mobile’s on those lower-speed connections (2G/Edge), the maximum bitrate available to the device is just 48 kilobits per second. That’s typically just 5-10% of the 3G capacity. 

So, if you’re a radio station, and you want to give your app a fighting chance of being heard on the move, you need to offer a stream that’s able to get through those ‘thin pipes’ too. That’s why we’re asking stations in the new Radioplayer app to supply their ‘mobile-friendly’ streams at 48 kilobits per second or less. 

Unfortunately, we’ve found that many stations are using 56 or 64 kilobit streams in their apps and mobile sites. Having tested these streams, we can confirm that on 2G connections (where your mobile users will be 40% of the time), they just don’t work at all. 

So the message is simple. If we want radio to remain a ‘mobile medium’, we need to work out how to make phone listening as reliable as desktop listening is now. In the medium term, the answer could be more FM/DAB chips in phones, so the audio arrives via broadcast radio, not the mobile networks. 

But until that happens – your mobile-friendly streams have to be at 48 kilobits or less, or they’ll choke.  

There’s good news though…. 

→ Reducing the bitrate is easy, and it saves you money. Just call your streaming provider

→ A well-encoded AAC stream at, say 40 kilobits, should sound great in your own mobile apps, the Radioplayer mobile app, and even your Radioplayer console

→ And you can also give us a second, higher-quality stream if you want. The app will switch to it automatically when it can 

Here are a couple of examples of decent-quality ‘mobile-friendly’ streams, running at 48k or less. Try opening them on your phone. And please get in touch if you have any questions – contact@radioplayer.co.uk. 

Amber Sound, at 32 kilobits AAC

KISS 100, at 48 kilobits AAC

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

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

Download the details here.

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.

Though not without its own issues, community radio offers a strong proposition for both advertisers and listeners; with niche content, rich in localness and personality.

There is a broad range of community radio stations in this country, many of which are now becoming interested in Radioplayer. Just today TCR FM launched a neat sponsored console, with a fantastic contact box, as well as detailed user-friendly playlist information.

In fact, simply carrying out a quick search for community stations on Radioplayer shows the diverse range of community stations already signed up.

Cross Rhythms City Radio is a great example of what a small community radio station can do using very little resource. With latest track information, artist profile, song rating, web-cam capability, studio contacts and social networking links, it’s packed full of great features.

But the functionality that has been implemented best is the “Listen Again” tab. Although it’s slightly hidden on the console, when clicked it takes users to an alphabetised list of previously aired shows with a short synopsis of each broadcast, making finding the content you want easy.

BCB in Bradford is another flagship community. The console is clear, bright and distinctive with all interaction directing the user straight to the BCB website where there’s a blog, a collection of podcasts and multiple social networking links.

We’re starting at a relatively small base, but the number of community stations is rapidly growing on Radioplayer and more are joining every month. Now with over 300 stations, the majority of broadcasters joining Radioplayer are community stations.

Radioplayer helps create a level playing field. By launching consoles, community stations are strengthening their position, growing audiences and ensuring that they are only one click away from some of the largest broadcasters in the UK.

We’re keen for as many community stations to join as possible. The Radioplayer team is able to assist stations in setting up their metadata and if needed even build specific consoles.

If you’re involved in community radio and interested in joining Radioplayer, please use the Contact tab to get in touch.