James Cridland’s Radioland: To London and back: while Canada’s CRTC sits on their hands
Brad Hill
James Cridland, radio futurologist, is a conference speaker, writer and consultant. The original pos is HERE. James also publishes Podnews, a daily briefing on podcasting. Buy James a coffee HERE.
To London, and then on to Germany. As a former trustee of the Radio Academy – now the Audio Academy – I never actually got to speak at the Radio Festival; so it was great to speak at the Audio Festival, in a full room. Always lovely to see so many friendly faces: though plenty of new, younger, faces in the crowd. They tell you that none of the kids are interested in radio these days; but the Audio Festival was clear that there are plenty of younger people. Good. And, also, good to see the Community Media Association later that weekend, with many more people who were enthusiastic and excited about the state of the medium.
It’s been very clear, from my LinkedIn feed, that Canadian radio is running out of patience with the CRTC, who promised a year ago to review parts of its regulation of the industry – regulation widely suspected to be holding the industry back – only to do absolutely nothing. I write a full piece, what’s the CRTC even doing?, elsewhere on my blog. The Canadian industry is in a mess; and the CRTC is partially responsible.
The Playdate, a little black and white games console, now has a radio player in it. The Peedee ICF-390 app, just $3, just lets you scan through the dial using the crank on the side of the device: no searching, just serendipitous discovery of radio stations. It’s rather fine.
Tom Webster writes Smart TV Killed the Smart Speaker Star, which is clearly a lazy Buggles headline – though he apologises for it – and to me – in the first paragraph. “As a conduit for podcasting, the smart speaker is objectively a failure.”
Apple Music opened a fancy new music recording space in London. Meanwhile, I was able to have a look round Bauer Media’s new “Playground” – which has the capability to become a recording space in the basement of The Lantern, its home in London. Someone I worked with in Germany this week was excited after visiting a public radio station in the US with its own performance space (“they get people in! hundreds of people!”). It’s interesting to see more broadcasters highlight what they’re good at – getting people together, a community of common interest. Of course, podcasting is doing similar too.
I realised something about advertising these days – the art of copywriting has disappeared from magazine ads, out of home, posters, and other parts of advertising. In a blog post I write a little about this – dimly realising that if the skills required for great copywriting are disappearing, what happens to those media that still require great copy: including radio and podcasting?
I took my little DAB+ radio with me on this trip. Within London, there are an almost incomprehensible number of radio stations – 162 different stations available with a little antenna in West London. Rather fewer available in Potsdam, close to Berlin in Germany: “only 65”. Interesting that in London, all the stations were comparatively easy to receive, but in Germany, my hotel room appeared to act much like a Faraday cage, making good reception almost impossible to achieve. Anyway – most folk reading this would be nervous if they had 162 different radio stations in their market!
In the US, GeoBroadcast Solutions are rebranding to “Aktira” – but the tech they have is becoming more broadly adopted. Something called MAXXCasting is a little like the mesh network you might have for your wifi: taking FM broadcasts and producing a synchronised set of transmitters to better cover the transmission area, with fewer bad patches. The company says that more than fifteen deployments have so far been done – it’s much like how DAB works in some countries. ZoneCasting seems to take this a little further, allowing split advertising to different areas, using (if I understand this right) the same FM frequency. Neat stuff: and good that people are spending time trying new things with analogue broadcasting.
I forgot to mention that while I was in New York City, I tuned into “1010 WINS 92.3 FM” – the fast-paced all-news station. It’s difficult to hear outside of the US, thanks to geo-blocking, but it’s a great service. I particularly enjoyed hearing the announcer taking about the 100th birthday of NBC – by singing the NBC chimes (wouldn’t get that anywhere else). The choice of stories was great, too – not just politics and sports, but something to give you a story to tell over a coffee with someone later: like a story of a couple who checked into their hotel room, went to bed, fell asleep, and it was only when they woke up at 6.30am that they realised someone was under the bed, asleep. Yikes.
