FROM YOU TUBE TO iPLAYER
We saw last week that radio broadcasting is at a bit of a crossroads with the change to all-digital broadcasting in the UK likely to be concluded by early 2018.
It's also fighting hard for audience share and influence with a range of streaming services, particularly in the world of music and new releases.
And is if all of that wasn't enough, You Tube, the video-sharing service now owned by Google, has made large in-roads into its relationships with the major record labels and is often the first port of call for "new music". That's certainly how I use it and very effective it is too.
Here in the UK, the BBC is not resting on its laurels and we'll explore its secret weapon in the battle against new media shortly. In the meantime, though, let's look at how You Tube has become such a behemoth following its launch back in 2005. It was founded by three former Pay Pal employees who wanted a quick and easy way to share videos and decided to do their own thing. A technology start-up with $11.5m soon followed and the first video was posted on the nascent service on April 23rd 2005. A formal launch took place in November and six months later, 65,000 videos were being posted every day. Advertising was the methodology for making money and following the Google take over in late 2006, this monetisation led to agreements with a number of film and TV outlets to run clips and whole shows and films on the site.
Alongside all of this, music fans started posting large volumes of singles and album tracks, often with lyric videos or photographic slide-shows to accompany the audio content. Needless to say, the whole area of legally posting recorded music was a bit of a grey area: record companies and rights owners complained bitterly and managed to get significant numbers of postings blocked. But, this was not always the best policy and some of the majors soon realised that they could benefit from You Tube and its vast number of users. Whilst copyright material still shouldn't be posted by users, it is difficult to police and You Tube leave it to the copyright owners to oversee what goes on. Several major copyright owners (usually record companies, record labels, production companies and so forth) have now reached agreement with You Tube and set up a partnership programme - in return for officially making their own content available for free, they would take a cut (55%) of the advertising revenues. Thus new singles and albums were often now promoted on You Tube with videos and clips and in an increasing number of cases, two or three tracks from an album.
To compete with the newer streaming services such as Netflix (for movies) and Spotify (for music), You Tube has tried to jump aboard the streaming bandwagon by launching over 50 subscription channels which provide premium content in return for a monthly fee, the fee ranging from 99c through to $6.99 depending upon the option selected.
Irrespective of these evolutionary moves, You Tube has become - for many people - the prime source for checking out newly released music and new bands.
So, where does this leave radio?
As I've written elsewhere, radio still has a key role to play in promoting new music. It can do the searching and finding for you - and then present it in an appropriate show with comment from an expert DJ or presenter. Hopefully. But, if radio doesn't move with the times, it will end up a niche player - and this is where that BBC secret weapon comes in. It's not that secret really as it uses the existing BBC iPlayer as a basis. The iPlayer is a powerful tool that allows a vast range of BBC TV and radio broadcasts to be viewed after broadcast without the need to remember to record anything. It has played a massive role in supporting timeshifting viewing and for big shows (such as Dr Who), something in excess of a million viewers will use that method to watch the show - rather than the old-style view-by-appointment. And so it came to pass that this week - October 9th to be precise - new BBC Director General Tony Hall has announced in a key note speech the launch of BBC Playlister.
Playlister is an extension of the radio section of the iPlayer and it takes some of the features that exist in rival streaming services and then cleverly links them directly to its radio broadcasts and music played. It's due for a formal launch in the new year, but I've been playing with a beta test version this week and so far, I'm very impressed with what it does.
If you use the Radio Player to tune in to BBC national stations, you'll already see that it shows the name of the song and artist being played and, by linking straight through to the station website (such as BBC 6 Music), the list of tracks played in the show being listened to is added to in real time. I've found this invaluable in checking out a song and then going on to You Tube or a band website to check it out some more. What Playlister does is expand the information provided and critically, draws together all the tracks played across the national stations, presents them in a user-friendly screen for you - and then allows you to click on a song and listen to it whenever you like.
Playlister not only allows you to listen to a vast range of musical output, track by track, when ever you want, it also lets you set up your own playlists by choosing to save selections from the broadcast items shown. You can also click on the song details on the Radio Player window to save a track to your playlist - a facility which I have found to be very handy indeed. BBC presenters are also putting their own playlists together in a similar way and these too can be accessed quickly and smoothly - and for me, this is a key way to find out about new music across all the key national channels. For those who listen to Radio 1's digital only station, 1-Extra, there's even going to be a visual version of the services through Playlister. Your selections can also be exported to various mobile listening devices, thus providing real portability and, interestingly enough, when they are exported, they go through to......Spotify. So, perhaps there is some "playing safe" involved after all by keeping the rivals close by and involved. At launch date, other music services will be added - including You Tube and Deezer and others will surely emerge too.
No doubt the details will change following the trials with the beta version, but I suspect that this new Playlister will be a valuable service, marrying as it does the best of radio with the flexibility of listening via a streaming service. The BBC aren't paying anything to the third party players involved, so to listen to those playlists, users will need to either sign up to Spotify or make use of You Tube, but I suspect as time goes by, this area will develop further.
So, that's how things rest right now and I'll no doubt return to the theme when Playlist is formally launched in 2014. In the meanwhile, we surely do live in interesting times.
Have fun.
Alan Dorey
9th October 2013
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