James Cridland, the radio futurologist, is a conference speaker, writer and consultant. He runs the media information website media.info and helps organise the yearly Next Radio conference. He also publishes podnews.net, a daily briefing on podcasting and on-demand, and writes a weekly international radio trends newsletter, at james.crid.land.
James Cridland’s articles
- Australian radio’s christmas-time sabotage – I’m bewildered at the holiday period for media here. It does seem to work, but for a Brit it’s very strange indeed.
United States
- SiriusXM To Pay Higher Royalty Rate – 15.5%, higher than the UK’s already high rates.
- TicToc by Bloomberg – a new TV channel on Twitter – is kind of like Euronews. Lots of automated clips. I can see it being useful in supermarket queues, though also useful is a complex thing called “reading”.
United Kingdom
- UK radio is being deregulated – David Lloyd looks at what it might mean, and John Myers has a go too. In short: no more music format regulation, news will be quite tightly regulated, no requirement for local programming, old AM/FM licences can be handed back if you don’t want them and they won’t be re-advertised, DAB multiplexes has no regulatory requirement for approval of changes. Much of this isn’t too different to where we are now, it seems to me – great swathes of output is networked anyway, and DAB multiplexes could change anything they wanted just by asking. That said, I’m pleased to see the AM/FM licence non-re-advertising thing, since I’ve been calling for that for some time.
- Radioplayer searches for tech partner – this is a big opportunity for radio tech companies.
- Just in time for Christmas, the Global Player, from the UK’s largest commercial radio group, is now available (fittingly, globally) on Android devices.
- Interesting blog post from the BBC who are going https. Particularly, mobile networks fiddle with data sent in http and break things (one of the reasons I went https a while back – I found one coffee shop adding ads on the top of my own website!).
- No idea how real this list of royalty figures for Christmas songs is, but if true, goodness.
- Anyone want to buy a radio station in the UK? Here you go…
- UK television discovers local radio’s favourite phone-in subject.
- “My Top 200 Tweeters of 2017” – Iain Dale knows how to get a retweet
- This is a nice thing for a radio station to do – congratulations, BBC Radio York.
Australia
- Smart speakers, podcasts and branded audio – radio predictions 2018 from Australia’s radio industry
- Australian radio’s christmas-time sabotage (I’m bewildered)
- Well, that’s one way to market a new show. Not entirely sure I’d have written this copy though.
- The Australian ABC has made their news app now available globally, which is good. It’s light, fast, looks good and works well.
Elsewhere
- New law in Italy. From January 1, 2020 all [new] radio receivers (domestic and installed on cars) must have the ability to receive [DAB] digital radio. I gather a similar law is on the cards in France, once a coverage metric is hit.
- Also in Italy, RAI issue a tender for someone to build 42 DAB+ transmitters to bring RAI radio nationwide.
- If you’re wanting a free and really very beautiful game to play over the holidays on your Android phone, I’d recommend Datawing. Really good, simple, and even idiots like me can complete it.
- An interesting graph showing the market shares of iOS and Android since 2009. Tim Page points out on Facebook that it’s interesting that iOS share hasn’t grown; others rushed to point out that iOS users love their apps and use them much more (true – but then, devs don’t prioritise Android and we often get no app at all, or some cut-down nonsense); and that Android phones are cheap and rubbish (there are lots of those, but also lots of premium devices too).
- Another AM transmitter bites the dust – this time in the Solomon Islands
- NZ Radio Awards 2018 – another for your calendar