NEWS published on 30 Sep 2015

New Radio Day 2015 wraps up by exploring the future of 'personalised radio'

New Radio Day 2015 wraps up by exploring the future of 'personalised radio'
New Radio Day panellists (L to R): Andrew Scott (BBC), Tomas Granryd (SR), Outgoing Head of Radio Christian Vogg (EBU), Caroline Graze (NRJ) and Laurent Finet (RTBF)

The 3rd annual New Radio Day concluded with an in-depth look at how Members can develop new ‘personalised radio’ services and a showcase of examples from the USA, Sweden and Germany among others.

NPROne, from EBU Associate Member National Public Radio of America, was presented by the broadcaster’s Senior Project Manager Tejas Mistry. The app, which launched in 2014, curates content from 935 affiliated stations in a way that mimics an actual radio programme. 

“The idea is that the listener hits ‘play’, puts his phone in his pocket and then lets us drive the user experience for them,” said Tejas Mistry. “NPR has 6 of the top ten podcasts on iTunes. We want to bring those listeners in house so we can use data to give recommendations based on what you’ve listened to. If they don’t like the content they can skip it, it will be replaced and slowly the app starts to learn the individual’s preferences.”

Sweden’s RadioPlay also provides a service that mirrors live radio. “Our listeners told us that people were happy with linear radio if it’s well curated and well packaged,” said Simon Gooch, Digital Media Director with Bauer Media Group who own the app. “We found that employing the listening history of users and then presenting content relevant to them was the sensible thing to do. We have four core concepts – the user needs change when listening on different devices, it needs to be easy to find content, listeners should be able to save the music that they discover and users expect a personalised experience.”

The BBC’s Andrew Scott, General Manager of Product/Radio told New Radio Day that the priority for the British broadcaster when developing new services is that “the scope of choice makes sense for the listener as well as for us.”

“We have a number of personalisation features across the BBC so we now have a deep knowledge of listeners as users," he continued. “Having access to technology isn’t the problem  - its combining that with the huge amount of content across our 58 stations that’s the challenge – finding the right balance between editorial and algorithmic is hard.”

The EBU’s Technology and Innovation department invited Members to get in touch to help them employ new technology such as Radio DNS and Hybrid Content Radio which mixes linear and non-linear radio. Mathias Coinchon, Senior Project Manager discussed the new platforms, like DIY.fm, that allow listeners to build their own radio programme. “The question,” he said “is how to deploy the new technology and how to standardise it in every device"

New Radio Day 2015 ended with two workshops. The first looked at the potential threat posed by third party platforms to public service media - asking will they “eat our content?” Tomas Granryd from Swedish Radio didn’t feel pressured. “We should not try to get people to come to us,” he argued, “but get people to consume us wherever they are. We have to think of ourselves as content producers trying to get people to listen to our stuff – it doesn’t matter where – but we must brand it well of course.”

Third party platforms like Spotify weren’t of interest to Laurent Finet from French Belgian Member RTBF. We don’t speak with Spotify.  We don’t need them – what can they bring to us? If we give them our content it benefits them not us," he told the audience. "We’re on Youtube but as a public broadcaster with commercials we don’t want too many things on other platforms because we want people to come to our platforms. We want our brands and our content primarily on our sites."

The final workshop saw all the delegates split into groups to come up with ideas for a new unique ‘personalised’ radio service.  Among the concepts presented were REGAL – an app where the listener can personalise a particiular 'live' show, taking out bits of the programme they aren't interested in, like sport perhaps, and adding more music or more news etc.

Another, called InteractiveSilence, would give listeners the option to pause the radio when they need some silence to contemplate what they’ve just heard and perhaps interact with guests who have been on the air or other listeners.

The EBU’s New Head of Radio was also introduced to the delegates from 20 EBU Radio Members. Graham Dixon, former Managing Editor of BBC Radio 3, told the audience that “Radio and internet works so well in parallel – it’s important that the things we're talking about today are communicated to your directors – unless we all move together the future of radio is far weaker.”

He paid tribute to his predecessor Christian Vogg, who organised New Radio Day for the past three years and now returns to WDR in Cologne, and added, “the EBU is here to support you, bring you together and present the new fantastic future. As long as people have ears they will always need to listen to wonderful output and content from you.”