Opinions

Radio still retains the qualities and benefits which have made it the most available global communications medium.

Introduction

Radio still retains the qualities and benefits which have made it the most available global communications medium. Its cost-effective coverage, its ability to carry messages across geographical and political boundaries and the universal availability of cheap, portable receivers have led to radio becoming the platform of choice when you need to communicate. Whoever and wherever your audience is.

As technology develops, additional platforms become available which are able to reach into some areas traditionally served by radio. For example, the meteoric uptake of the mobile phone and the more measured, but equally impressive adoption of the personal computer, have led to a global roll-out of network technology and infrastructure that connects broadcasters with their audiences. This network technology is becoming converged into IP (Internet Protocol) networking, which provides an ideal foundation for the delivery of all digital media, such as Audio/Video-On-Demand, Mobile/Web streams and Podcasting.

To add some perspective, it took just under 40 years for radio to achieve a global audience of 50 million people. Television achieved the same audience level in less than 15 years. The Internet took under five years. Compare this with the first billion mobile phone subscribers, who took 20 years to bring online. The next billion took a little over three years, with the third billion joining in less than two more. With this global penetration, over 50 percent of the world’s population is potentially available for a range of content delivered over the mobile platform. Around 300 million of these mobile users are connected to 3G networks, indicating that the market for sophisticated mobile content is a significant and rapidly growing one. As of today, the greatest growth in the mobile market is taking place in China, Africa and India.

The Opportunity

The availability of a new route to the global audience must be treated as an opportunity for existing broadcasters and content producers. In its simplest form, making an existing radio channel available over the Internet can gain additional audiences without changing the editorial content. Simultaneous streaming over the Internet and the traditional airwaves is a cost-effective method of increasing the programme reach beyond the range of the existing transmission network. This is especially important to the broadcaster whose target audience is a diaspora or ex-patriot community who wish to stay in touch with “home” broadcasts. In addition, programming which would be considered of minority interest within the constraints of terrestrial radio transmission, can attract a significant audience when made available on a global scale.  The continued roll-out of the M-Bone (multicast-enabled Internet) and the fast growth in the number of peer-to-peer streaming technologies will ensure that the Internet platform becomes more cost-effective and therefore attractive for radio content. Add to this the time-independent benefits of Audio-On-Demand and bandwidth tolerance of Podcasting - file-based delivery not requiring the constant, high bit-rate of streaming delivery - and the whole Internet opportunity becomes a significant content delivery tool available to broadcasters. Today, one in seven adult Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 listens to radio over the Internet on a weekly basis.

However, even greater audience gains are to be made by extending and developing content to exploit the strengths of the platform and the habits of the audience loyal to that platform.

Developing the Opportunity: The Appetite for Change

As a broadcaster, you must ask the question “Are we pioneers or pragmatists?. Are we comfortable leading the market, or shall we base our strategy on trends we already see becoming established?” If innovation is part of your branding, then there can be massive benefits in terms of public relations and audience perception in adopting new platforms for your programming. Major international broadcasters, such as the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle, pride themselves on their ability to be visionary and lead the world in the adoption of effective technology to deliver their programming to their global audiences. They were both there at the forefront of making their content available on the Internet via Audio-On-Demand and Podcasting and are recognised pioneers of driving new content delivery technology.

If you are more of a trend follower, then there will still be a time when you will need to adopt diverse platforms or be prepared to lose audience share as more and more content becomes generally available. Now is the time to start adapting your journalistic, production and distribution processes, so that the adoption of additional channels to your audience becomes the natural evolution, incurring only incremental cost as opposed to a major capital and human resource investment. These adaptations are commonly referred to within the industry under the banner of ‘convergence’; the convergence of media skill-sets and the convergence of enabling broadcast and telecommunications technologies.

It would be simplistic to suggest that you can deliver the same, unmodified, content across multiple platforms with equal effectiveness. You can’t, but you can base the various platforms’ programming upon the same unedited raw material. By accurately describing and annotating your unedited content within a defined template, you create meaningful metadata (information which indexes and defines the essence, or “raw" programme material), which allows new content to be effectively searched and linked with existing content, be it words, audio, pictorial or video. This will help remove a lot of the downstream cost required in producing multi-platform programming, or indeed in re-using material on the same platform. For example, a serial programme stream, such as traditional radio, may be logically broken down into topical components and presented on the web, together with links into the more detailed base content. Graphics and background links may be quickly associated from the archive and also added, giving a richer media experience tailored to the Internet. Content can be re-purposed to be effective on, and compliant with, a particular platform rather than being generated from the start. Companies, such as iZotope, create software solutions which can automatically provide quality control and modify audio for compliance with broadcasters’ requirements. This includes level adjustment, silence detection and programme length adjustment. Combining this with automated transcoding gives a cost-effective method of repurposing audio content across multiple, file-based platforms, without significant additional manual effort and concerns over the quality of output.

If a broadcaster has video capabilities as well, then within the broadband TV and mobile video domains, companies such as Amberfin are working on software technology which will automatically optimise content for the available bandwidth. Techniques including motion estimation, noise reduction, dynamic re-framing and compression are all combined to enhance the user experience of viewing on a mobile platform. As of today, this works at the file level, but as technology advances, the techniques will undoubtedly be applied to real-time streaming.

With the value of adding metadata early on in the content production chain clearly recognised, the archive has become central to many broadcast workflows. From newsroom operations through to major satellite film networks, the archive is becoming an ingest depository, rather than being used to capture the finished programme as it is broadcast. As an example, in the case of an international satellite film network, differences in local broadcasting regulations can be accommodated within metadata attached to the uncensored film. The benefit of this is that the media has to be stored only once, with the presentation to the local viewer being defined by the metadata and controlled by the playout system live at the time of transmission.

Converged Content Delivery

To maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of addressing a multi-platform workflow, it would seem logical to carry the metadata-plus-essence model described above, through into the content delivery process, minimising the storage and handling of multiple formats of the same media.  Wherever possible, the content should be held in its base (original) format so that the various platforms can be serviced at the highest possible quality. Metadata handling must form an integrated and central part of the overall media distribution and delivery process, driving the content through the various channel-specific media aggregations and transformations.