James Cridland is Managing Director of media.info, and a U.K.-based radio futurologist. He is a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. Find out more or subscribe at http://james.cridland.nets
James Cridland sends us his weekly links ahead of RAIN Summit Atlanta, where he’ll be a participant.
James Cridland’s articles
- The future of radio might be in transmitters, I write in AllAccess
- BBC quietly launches ‘live rewind’ for radio – very cool.
- Launch of live radio playout system in the cloud – quite a neat service for running radio stations online
United Kingdom
- Radio X: James Brownlow is a fan. Robin Blamires has a rather more balanced view. The News Mutt likes him too. Matt Deegan analyses the show and discovers it doesn’t have much clutter – well, apart from Moyles himself.
- How Black Pirate Radio Stations Revolutionised London’s Music Scene
- Binaural sound is back: Making audio an immersive experience – great coverage of Rupert Brun at Next Radio. He runs a newsletter too, by the way: seek it out.
- “Open-up the archives” – Cory Doctorow’s ‘big idea’ for the BBC seems rather naive. He misunderstands how much the BBC owns, misunderstands what this would all cost, and fundamentally misunderstands how media works: which, given his “thing” is talking about copyright, is puzzling.
- I missed this when it aired last year – but goodness, this is clever. Broadcasting a phone-in from a cable car.
United States
- US radio is crowing over ad-blockers. Foolishly: they will harm radio, too: those clever online ad replacement services are easily blocked. Seth Godin claims that advertisers have simply missed the chance to do advertising well; and here’s a fascinating click-fraud article highlighting some of the issues with online advertising.
- A new and quite nice television ad for Pandora.
- The seven secrets of podcasting. Nice hints and tips.
- Where are the next great female radio stars, asks Brad March
- Old-Time Radio Reborn: Why Podcasts Work – although why the fascination with old-time radio, I really don’t know. I wish we’d stop.
- Interesting article on Beats 1 which hints at teething trouble
- Good thought – keeping social media in perspective. Your social media followers are probably the P1s who really need looking after; but even so, we might be spending a little too much time on them.
- Is PPM Killing HD Radio? Interesting article. The tech in the article is a little scrambled; but I could well believe that the audio encoding techniques used by HD Radio could interfere with the encoded watermark – and Dick Taylor also pointed out that HD side channels are often used to feed FM translators, which adds more potential for interference.
- This American Life’s audio hackathon ends up with loads of people trying to solve podcast’s main problem…
Australia
- Some great speakers at the National Radio Conference next week. I am a massive fan of the CRA.
- Doing my research for move there. Learning about triple j’s history. I am a massive fan of the ABC.
[Impressive signing for Triton(https://rainnews.com/australian-radio-company-macquarie-joins-tritons-a2x-programmatic-platform/) and their a2x platform. I am a massive fan of Macquarie. - And you thought BBC Radio 4 Today has had a bad week. Here’s how Kiss 1065’s Kyle Sandilands quizzed an Australian minister. I am a massive fan of ARN.
- Netflix – not as big as you think. Tiddly compared to catch-up services like iPlayer or iView. I am a massive fan of Seven West.
- I am moving to Brisbane to live there in mid November. I am a massive fan of anyone who might employ or contract me.
Elsewhere
- Hong Kong: “no government support” is the reason why DAB is failing, apparently. Hmmm. Try programming, marketing and device availability.
- Nigeria: WFM is a new women’s radio station.