Traditional Radio becoming Irrelevant- Part II
Wow, the first post has gotten some great comments and hasstemmed a lot of thoughts and ideas. I will post more about those ideas later. But, before I move on to part II let me address why I have taken such an active role in this Radio talk. Well it is simple, I see a lot of similarities with traditional radio and the traditional church. Sound odd, well I don’t think that it is as much as a stretch as you might think. It all goes back to this: Separation of Theology and Methodology. You must do this in the local church, and you must do this in the radio industry. I will stop there!
While I was surfing around on my Bloglines I ran into this post from O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software
How could you enhance a one-to-many national radio station by building in the many-to-many-style interactions of Flickr or the weblog community? How might lessons from social software further blur the distinction between listeners and broadcasters by pushing interactivity beyond the phone-in or the online poll?
(1) The "Ten-Hour Takeover" used SMS technology, pattern matching, and statistical analysis to give the British public control of BBC Radio 1's musical output. For ten hours, there was no planned playlist--every track was chosen by listeners via text messages. We turned these messages into a navigable information space of artists, tracks, and listeners that the DJs could interact with directly. Moreover, the loosely coupled component-based infrastructure has allowed us to deploy new mobile-based products (SMS and MMS) quickly and easily.
(2) A component-based architecture also allows us to hook together SMS, track now-playing, and show scheduling systems with each other and with third-party services. BBC R&Mi are using this as a basis for exploring social software models of interactivity: the potential of Flickr/del.icio.us-style tagging for radio; the possibilities of combining buddy lists with media players; new applications for SMS; and concepts like "100 Composers"--DABJava applications on PDAs that can have data trickled to them over broadcast radio.
The session presents work from BBC Radio & Music Interactive's Technical Architecture and R&D teams, including demonstrations of existing software and working prototypes of new projects.
Currently in the UK many radio stations are leveraging Podcasting and many additional emerging technologies. Here again is the call to action: Traditional Radio Guys, wake up and get in gear before you become irrelevant.
[link] see more about the conference.