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This September the EBU’s Digital Radio conference wil take place in Sardinia to coincide with the Prix Italia. The focus will be the turning attention of the radio industry to all things web based and the debate over the balance between terresterial broadcasting versus the Internet as the future for digital radio. I’ll be there as part of the DRACE - digital radio cultures in Europe network and wil be talking about podcasting and exploring some research on how podcasting is working and how audiences are using it. My colleague from DIT Dr Brian O Neill will also be at the conference and we’re hoping to engage with public broadcasters on some of the key issues challenging digital radio in Europe. The DRACE network is working on a book publication for 2009 and we’re presenting work at the forthcoming ECREA conference in Barcelona in November. Its interesting how much has changed since we started work in mid 2004 as a pan-European research network - podcasting had hardly entered the realm of our conversation and the growth of downloads and rss feed content (ie podcasts) is one of the big changes the radio industry has seen in the past two years. In Ireland more people are listening to podcasts than the DAB trials and the growth of content in audio and video podcasts has been remarkable throughout 2008. Podcasting has largely been good news for traditional radio in that its allowed those stations to extend their content life and reach young audiences in a new way. Its allowed them to provide an on demand service to listeners whether its Morning Ireland or the Right Hook. In many ways what the audience is directly and immediately responding to is the ability to select what they want when they want it - rather than saying they want more and more linear streamed channels of low grade quality. The big question of what will fund the move to podcasting - and online content - when its separated from traditional spot advertisement? Those are some of the interesting and fun questions we’ve been asking in our podcasting research.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.