ETech Day 2: Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5981

As you may know, I've given up on listening to the radio in this country. My friends from Germany were trying to listen to the radio in the car on the drive to San Diego and asked me a question about the FM receiver in my car. I just shrugged and responded that I'd never used it before. This is why I was surprised when the presenters stated that radio in the UK is re-emerging.

But now after the session I am pleased to report that radio is not dead and that radio may still have a chance -- at least in the UK. The first thing outlined was BBC's 10 Hour Takeover, where the BBC 1 radio programming was put into the hands of listeners for 10 hours during a recent holiday. Listeners could send in their play requests via SMS on their mobile phones to the BBC and the BBC would play it. No rules on what kind of music could be requested -- if the BBC had it and enough people were requesting it, they played it. What a concept!

The BBC interactive team developed software to retrieve, parse and tally the incoming SMS messages into a coherent playlist that the DJs would then broadcast. This is far from a trivial task, since parsing (near) free form text to extract a track name and an artist name is not a simple task -- especially via SMS where people are used to using abbreviations for event the most common words. I won't get into the greater details of how they implemented the system, but here are some buzzwords for you: SMS, XML, FTP, SQL, text indexing and a web interface.

The upshot is that the project was a huge success -- a vast number of people participated and sent in their requests. The project was so successful that it has been repeated on two other holidays. After the session, an audience member asked if the resultant playlist differed much from the normal BBC 1 playlist and the answer was: Yes. At first people starting requesting the usual music that BBC 1 would play, but the team initially preferred tracks that were more off the beaten path. But once listeners understood that the sky was the limit, the requests became very different from the normal playlist.

I'm pleased to see that the BBC is thinking about approaches to reinvigorating radio. The team laid out their principles as follows:

• An individual should be rewarded for participating
• Contributions should provide value to others
• The BBC should get value from the service and expose that value back to the contributors.

When comparing these principles to the principles in use by US broadcasters (read: increase shareholder value, regardless of what our customers think) they are simply revolutionary. I do hope that these principles are not a fluke at the BBC and that the results that came from them will be broadly applied at the BBC.

The remainder of the presentation covered two other projects at the BBC: Phonetags, which applies the principles from above using a del.ico.us tagging folksonomy to provide music bookmarking, tagging, organizing and sharing. The presentation also covered group listening which aims to apply the above principles to collaborative listening to gather more relevant data about people listening to music. In a lot of ways it sound similar to what last.fm is doing with their Audioscrobbler and personal music channel projects.

I can only hope that some folks from US radio companies are paying attention to the BBC. If you aren't you'll be out of a job soon!

Did you catch the 10 hour take over? If so, what did you think about it?