The BBC Radio blog

An Archive for the Future

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:05:00 +0000

The Science Explorer from BBC Radio 4

The Radio Festival which was held this week in Salford is the annual event where the Radio Industry gathers both to celebrate what we do and to look at where the Radio world is heading. In his keynote speech the BBC Director General Mark Thompson explained our plans to make a huge archive of speech radio available as part of our online Radio product.

The scale of the task is almost infinite. Our ambition is similarly big. Users should be able to find the highest quality BBC audio on any subject or about any person or place in which they are interested. They may go there out of commitment to a particular programme they know and love or they may find the audio via a search engine or another part of the BBC Website and be introduced to the riches of BBC Radio that they may never have encountered before. So my job along with others is to set some priorities and keep the ball rolling.

There is more to this than digging out a number of rather dusty old programmes and add an archive nostalgia corner to our website. As my former colleague Sue MacGregor reminds us in the Daily Telegraph today there are some gems that we must try to surface. However to focus only on these is to miss a bigger opportunity. The archive of speech radio must be of wide contemporary interest and will be at the very heart of our online offer. We must also ensure relevant programmes and extracts can be found easily by existing and new radio audiences.

We have already started the work. Over 20 hours of each week's Radio 4 output is added to the archive. We are also going back from the current schedule to build collections of the most relevant, useful, educational speech radio content that will supplement our current programming or agenda. Listeners inspired by Jim Al-Khalili's Life Scientific on Tuesday mornings can explore many more of the themes by listening to hundreds of archive programmes gathered in Radio 4's Science Explorer. Later this year a further 500 editions of Desert Island Discs going back to 1987 will be available as streams or downloads.

Radio 3's archive enables us to build a comprehensive audio guide to the world of classical music. We began with the Proms this summer where concert information was linked to relevant editions of Composer of the Week or Discovering Music. The site attracted record numbers of users. Look out for more of the same in the Symphony project which has started this week.

Radio 4's programme brands remain a significant point of entry to our sites and our content for many users. They are still a rich seam for us to mine. For example, we have presented archive items from Woman's Hour since the very beginning of the Radio 4 website. We know there is huge potential in that programmes' archive of encounters with a vast number of the great women of the last 60 years.

Archive underpins much of the wider BBC's online ambition so the radio archive will also be reached by journeys across the whole of BBC online. The content will also be a key element of future public service partnerships. All this will make radio bigger and more relevant than ever in the digital world. Making that archive portable via downloads that can be consumed on all devices is an essential requirement.

We know we are onto something exciting here from the way our archives are appreciated now. On air Radio 4 Extra has more listeners than any other BBC Digital only network and online there are more than 2 million requests every month for audio on demand. That is the second highest amount after Radio 4 itself. Only a month has past since we made the entire In Our Time archive available as downloads or podcasts and over 1 million editions have been downloaded. There have been over 5 million downloads of editions of Desert Island Discs since we launched the archive 5 months ago. The Reith Lecture Archive which goes back to 1948 has had almost a million downloads. There is lots more detail to come and I will keep you up to date on our progress here and on the BBC Radio 4 blog.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive

The Specialist Classical Chart Podcast is back - this time for good!

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:45:00 +0000

One of my recent joys working on our interactive services for BBC Radio has been receiving our monthly figures for downloads and podcasts from our site. Last month listeners successfully put 14.8 million downloads on their PCs or mobile devices.

That's up from 9.8 million in July last year. One of the reasons for the increase is the boost in the number of speech programmes we can now offer. The recent release of 500 editions of Desert Island Discs and the archive of the Reith Lectures has proved very popular. Podcasting is a great way to build up your own collection of programmes to enjoy whenever and wherever you want!

And although we have done great things with speech content, it's not been so straightforward with music in podcasts. So I'm really pleased to say that, as of today, we're bringing back a podcast which should appeal especially to classical music fans.

Although to date we've released many podcasts containing the speech content of classical music programmes, such as Composer of the Week, we've not been able to include longer extracts of classical music. That's because we don't have the rights or the permission to do this, and the BBC has been wary of doing anything that might adversely affect the commercial classical music industry.

But now, something has changed. Working with the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) earlier this year we tested a podcast of the segment of Radio 3 Breakfast that covers the Specialist Classical Music Chart every Tuesday morning. This includes a number of excerpts of music from the chart, each of which can be up to 9 minutes long.

The audience seemed to like the offer.

What's more, any fears that it might discourage people from buying classical music or listening to live radio proved unfounded. In fact nearly 25% of those who listened to the podcast said they were inspired to listen to more live radio, whilst 70% said they were listening to the same amount (eDigital Research for the BBC). 80% of listeners said the podcast had introduced them to music they had not heard before. Good news for the music industry came with the finding that 25% of listeners to the chart podcast had purchased classical music as a result. The BPI's classical committee is pleased with the outcome, saying the podcast supports the work to "...obtain a wider audience for the specialist classical chart and for serious classical music in general". So, all in all the trial was a success.

Now the BBC Trust has agreed to a change in the Radio 3 service licence to allow the Specialist Classical Music Chart to become a permanent offer from the BBC. The podcast is back from today, and you can download it here. As a distinctly average guitarist, I'm delighted that a classical guitar release is top of the chart at the moment, so I hope an extract of the number one is included.

Andrew Caspari is BBC Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive

The picture (from 1970) shows "Otto Klemperer who celebrated the bi-centenary of Beethoven's birth by conducting his nine symphonies in sequence with the New Philharmonic Orchestra".

Series catch-up for speech-based radio programmes is here

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:13:05 +0000

Ever since 2002, when we started offering listeners the chance to hear radio programmes on demand via the original Radio Player, listeners have consistently asked to be able to catch up on all the episodes of series whilst that series is on air. There is nothing more frustrating, they told us, than getting interested in a serial in the third week and not being able to catch up on the first two parts which disappear after 7 days. In fact we became quite concerned that people might not even start listening to a serial if they felt they would not be able to keep up.

Well, today we have had good news. The BBC Trust has approved plans to introduce 'series catch-up' for radio and we will introduce it over the coming weeks. This means all episodes of a selected range of series will be available on our websites and via the BBC iPlayer until 7 days after the final instalment has gone out. The first series to offer this is the magnificent Classic Chandler on Radio 4.

Series catch-up covers speech-based programmes where we have the rights in place and where there is a clear narrative that progresses from one episode to the next. On Radio 4 look out in particular for future Classic Serial dramas such as Patrick O'Brien's The Mauritius Command and The History of Titus Groan as well as Agatha Christie dramatisations. Some of our big factual series such as The Reith Lectures or The Story of Economics or other long-running history series will benefit too as will comedy serials such as Ed Reardon and Clare in the Community. Series catch-up will be possible for landmark series on all of the BBC's radio networks.

We conducted a trial of this offer last year. One of the projects featured was the Complete Smiley. The results from the audience were very encouraging. 7000 people responded to our survey and the headlines were:

90% of users surveyed claimed they listened to more radio online as a consequence of series catch-up being available.
More than half listened to programmes they otherwise wouldn't have listened to.
More than half listened to more BBC radio online due to series catch-up.
37% said they had listened to episodes of series they would otherwise have missed without series catch-up.

We are working hard to make it easier for our audiences to hear more of our programmes online and this has been a good couple of weeks. The Series Catch up approval comes hot on the heels of the Radio 3 and Radio 4 service licence reviews in which the BBC Trust encouraged us to increase the amount of archive content we make available on our sites. As an example of this we have just launched a collection of interviews with the authors whose books are being featured on World Book Night on March 5th. There will be much more of this kind of activity and I will update you on our progress in the coming months.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive at the BBC

Read the BBC Trust's decision on series catch-up here.
Radio 4 Controller Gwyneth Williams wrote about the Trust's review of service licences here on the blog and Director of Audio & Music Tim Davie responded in The Radio Times.
The illustration was created for the Classic Chandler season, one of those now available until seven days after the final transmission on the Radio 4 web site.