The BBC Radio blog

A Labs version of the BBC Radio homepage

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:33:45 +0000

Editor's note: On the BBC Internet blog there's news of a new test version of the BBC Radio homepage for you to try and out and submit your feedback - PM.

A screenshot of the Radio 1 Labs release

Today marks an important (if relatively modest) step for BBC radio on digital platforms, as we release a Labs version of the new BBC Radio homepage.

I'm an Executive Product Manager in BBC Future Media working on what will eventually (sometime during 2012) become the Radio and Music product, in line with the BBC's strategy for a small number of cross platform products, as outlined by Director of FM Ralph Rivera and previous Director Erik Huggers.

Today is the very first step on the ladder, as we have spent recent months building the foundations and are now keen to start to get feedback from users on this release of the Radio homepage.

Read the rest of the post, try our the Labs version of the BBC Radio homepage and submit your feedback on the Internet blog.

Music Showcase - a new way to find and enjoy BBC music content

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:20:31 +0000

A few weeks ago we released our first version of the BBC Music Showcase and this week we have made some important tweaks to the site following user testing. We've had some comments following posts from my colleagues Andy Puleston and Matt Coulson, so I thought I'd write to tell you a bit more.

So what is Music Showcase and why is it important? What we've released so far is an aggregation of all the BBC music content that is not a full-length programme. Our radio station sites and iPlayer cover that angle fairly well, but what we haven't cracked until now is getting those nuggets of great content out of their full-length programmes to expose them in new ways. That content could be a live music session, or an interview with an artist, or a feature about a single artist, a DJ mix or a live concert. The BBC creates this kind of content in droves but it's almost impossible to find what you are really interested in unless you know exactly what was broadcast and at what time. Most web users don't have the patience for the time-consuming searching that this involves.

Now we can start to pull all those special moments out of their full-length programmes and offer them via genre, 'curated collections' or artist search - or via filters like 'most popular', 'latest in', and 'about to expire'. In other words, these unique pieces of content are now accessible and can be put together in collections which make sense to users. So, for example, we have a collection of great music clips taken from live music sessions right across the BBC, another of classic interviews, and the Best of the Festivals 2010.

Music Showcase is just the start. The next stage is 'curated collections': we want to tap into the world-class talent that the BBC employs to generate human-powered recommendations. Our music radio networks filter, curate and recommend music every single hour of every day. Filtering the vast amount of music available is at the heart of what our stations do: from a radio station playlist (like Radio 1's and Radio 2's), through to specialist music experts such as Gilles Peterson, Jez Nelson or Bob Harris. So far, we haven't capitalised on this online. The opportunity opening up to us now is to allow these musical experts to have a real voice on bbc.co.uk.

This development requires a fairly significant cultural change at the BBC, a move to understanding the value of elements of whole programmes, not just the programmes themselves. To go from understanding this to actually clipping music content from programmes will require changes to the way we work and some new tools. These things will take time, but the feedback so far suggests there's a real appetite for it.

This is good news for broadcast radio. We're doing something which takes the fantastic content we make every day in our broadcast output and offers it in an appropriate manner for our digital audiences. This is truly a mashup of traditional broadcast media with digital media. I believe that it's projects like this that will help traditional media brands move successfully into the fully digital world.

The Music Showcase is just one of the strands of work feeding into our thinking around radio and music online, as discussed on the BBC Internet blog by Erik Huggers, Director of BBC Future Media & Technology. One thing is for certain: music aggregation and music recommendations from BBC talent will continue to be an important part of what we offer in the future.

Have a play with the Showcase and leave a comment here to let me know what you think. Remember it's still in alpha mode so expect to see lots of small updates over the coming weeks and months.

Chris Kimber is Managing Editor, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

The picture shows the Rolling Stones in concert. They're included in the Music Showcase collection Rock 'n' Roll DNA.

HD sound for the Electric Proms

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:04:41 +0000

You may have heard that we offered an extra high quality (320kbs AAC) online audio stream for the last week of the BBC Proms this year (read about the experiment on the BBC Internet blog). The feedback we received was almost universally good. Listeners really appreciated the richer sound quality which made a fairly obvious difference even to the casual listener. Well, I can now confirm that for the first time for non-classical output, we'll offer the same higher quality audio stream for this year's BBC Radio 2 Electric Proms concerts.

So if you listen to the concerts live via the Electric Proms web site you'll hear our highest ever audio stream quality. We'll also offer the full concerts on-demand in HD Sound, again exclusively via the Electric Proms site. If your connection cannot handle this new higher quality, you can choose to listen at the standard quality.

We chose to pilot HD Sound with the Electric Proms because these live concerts represent something unique, something you can't get elsewhere. Radio 2's Head of Music, Jeff Smith, has written a post for the About the BBC blog in which he explains the unique nature of this annual event. Of course, once we've assessed feedback from listeners and looked at the technical and cost aspects, we'll look to extend this improvement to other services.

Why is this important? Well with the growth of music streaming services such as We7, Spotify, Last.fm and of course YouTube, an increasing number of people are hooking up their home computers to high quality sound systems and speakers, meaning that what was previously acceptable in terms of sound quality for small computer speakers or cheap headphones is rapidly becoming less so.

As more and more people start to listen to music via internet streams, as opposed to listening from CDs or from downloaded audio files, we expect that it will sound at least as good. Similarly, as more people start to listen to radio online, both live and on-demand, we are way past the point where people will readily accept poor audio quality simply because it's being delivered over the internet.

So, if you're a fan of Elton John, Robert Plant or Neil Diamond, listen live or catch-up via the Electric Proms site. As Robert Plant once said, the song remains the same; it'll just sound better now.

Chris Kimber is Managing Editor at BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Read more about HD Sound in this blog post about the Radio 3 experiment and this FAQ.
The artists performing at the 2010 BBC Radio 2 Electric Proms are Robert Plant, Elton John and Neil Diamond. All the details are on the web site.
The picture shows two souvenir Neil Diamond figurines, submitted by Radio 2 listener Kathleen Mosley from Montrose in Scotland. View hundreds of other items of memorabilia on the Electric Proms web site.