Interview with 3RRR I.T. manager Phil Wales
Transcript:
What is radio on demand?
It’s essentially a service that lets anybody go back and listen to the show that they want, whenever they want. Via either a website on the desktop or via a mobile phone or a tablet. At this point we’ve got about 5 months worth of shows and the space to basically keep shows for the last 12 months. You can listen to it at high quality as well as, not low quality, but low bit rate if you want to depending on your connection.
What’s radio on demand’s aim?
It’s there for a range of things broadly speaking, one of the things we’ve noticed with people’s expectations, particularly of how they engage with a station online is essentially there is now an expectation that people can engage on the platform they want, when they want and it’s something that all broadcaster media has had to deal with. The rise of on demand services, catch up services for tv are meeting exactly the same kind of expectation that it’s no longer adequate to expect your audience to be able to tune in when the program is being broadcast live to air. So there was a range of things that the on demand service was put in place to cater to. It originally came out of when I was doing shows and people would say ‘I used to listen to tht regularly but now I’m doing blah blah when it’s on so I don’t get to hear it anymore’ and I wanted to fix that. And there’s also a range of shows that I don’t get to listen to because there are particular times when I am unable to be anywhere near a radio. It also functions as a way for me to explore the range of programming that triple r actually does so there’s a number of shows that I’ve now become a regular listener to that I’d never actually heard before because I wasn’t’ able it.
Does radio demand detract from live shows?
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just an adjunct. It allows people to engage in another way with the content that the station producers so some people will continue to want to listen to live when they’re available, when it’s available for them to do that. One of the strengths of live radio is its immediacy and for some people that’s going to remain an attractive proposition. But the ability to stream live, which means you don’t necessarily need to have access to the radio so you can listen to the station wherever you are in the world rather than just Melbourne. We do a range of podcasts so you don’t necessarily have to be online to listen to a particular program if a podcast is available for that you can download it and take it with you or the ability to go back and listen to a show whenever you want. They are all just added methods they don’t take away from the core strength of what the medium is about. I always find it kind of interesting that there are people that will describe the fact that radio is audio only as a weakness when in fact being audio only is one of radio’s greatest strengths because you’re not necessarily tied to a screen you can do other things while it’s occurring. I’ve heard people say a number of times particularly when things like podcasting started that live radio is effectively dead and let’s just say that those people have been proved wrong on a number of occasions. The core strength of radio remains exactly what it’s been for the last 70 or 80 years.
Do you have any statistics about how many people who listen to programs aren’t actually in the local community?
We know for instance how many hours a week or a month people are listening to the live stream. But it’s harder to pin down whether those people are in a work place somewhere in Melbourne where they’re not allowed to have the radio on so they’ve got their headphones on at the computer and they’re streaming. Or whether in fact they’re somewhere outside Melbourne. About 50% of the streaming traffic is Australian and 50% overseas. That 50% is very obviously not in the local community but the Australian traffic is a bit harder to pin down. I would say probably about 50% of the Australian listenership is probably not in the local area but it’s an estimate. We know there’s about, and you kind of interpolate this down from the amount of data that’s used, so we’re doing about 5 terabytes of data a month, which means it’s about 80 thousand listener hours a month. We don’t know at this point whether that’s 1 person listening all day verses a number of people tuning in for one program. Without more detailed stats and analytics than we’ve currently gone it’s hard to pin that down. We’ve got much better stats and analytics running on the Radio on Demand stuff but that hasn’t been running very long so our analysis on that is still in it’s formative stages. There’s a lot of people going and having a look at the radio on demand stuff and they’re listening but I suspect that because we launched it very softly, because I didn’t want ten thousand people jumping on all at once (because that’s a really good way to kill a server) it is one of those things that I’m seeing grow week by week. So when people first started talking about it on air there was a spike in traffic as people went to have a look but not everybody that was going to have a look sat there and listened to an entire show. Each week it’s been running I’ve seen the data use grow so more and more people are coming back to it and listening to shows which is good because that’s what it’s there for.
So do you feel that audiences were always quite active in their interaction with radio broadcasters or do you think that’s a development?
I think it depends a lot on the station, to be honest. Station’s like Triple R and other community stations to varying degrees have a much more direct interaction and contact with their audiences than some of the more obvious commercial broadcasters. It is something we talk about a lot that unlike many stations you can always pick up the phone, dial the station and you’re quite likely to actually get straight through to the person who’s putting the show to air. That is not always the case with some other stations. We’ve always had and we’ve always been lucky enough to have a pretty engaged audience. One of the things I’ve been saying about social media is that stations like Triple R have actually been doing social media for about 30 years. Just not online. And it is very much not all one way traffic compared to traditional broadcast setups. We’ve got a very passionate listener base, we’ve got a very passionate subscriber base, they are not backwards in coming forwards about stuff they like or don’t like, which is great because it’s a level of constant feedback that we’re comfortable with and it is actually what we are about. And if we’re fulfilling our brief then we need to be in pretty regular contact and engagement with the audience.
Do you think it’s because you are providing local content that’s relevant to them or because of technological accessibility?
I think the bulk of it is because of, I still feel that radio works best because it’s local. There is something about national broadcasters that to me feels less engaged directly with the people they’re broadcasting too because they have to be relevant to an entire country and a large set of locations. But to me that makes them slightly less relevant to all of those locations. So I think that that’s a big part of it. We do a fair amount of engagement with new delivery platforms but also because of the size of the audience, which is really significant, we’re not always right at the bleeding edge. So to illustrate that because of the size of Triple R’s audience which is - numbers in the hundreds of thousands. So when we were setting up a live streaming service we couldn’t do it with the capacity for 25 people to listen concurrently, we had to do something that was much higher spect. And what that usually means is when you don’t necessarily have the monetary resources to do that is it takes a while to put in place arrangements to cater for 5 terabytes a month and so forth. And similarly with the On Demand stuff, on a personal note, I’ve been wanting to this for about 7 years but 7 years ago we relocated from Fitzroy and for the next 4-5 years every cent was going into the building and so we just didn’t have the money to put into developing it and there wasn’t anything off the shelf that would do what I wanted it to do. So we just had to wait until we had better resources and at this stage with many fingers crossed, I’m very pleased with what we’ve come up with but it’s taken us a while to get there.
So about the website how regularly to you update it and how important it is?
Daily. I think it’s very important in the sense that it’s basically our new front door. So we get a lot more people visiting the website on a daily basis than coming through our actual front door, even though we do have a sort of general open access for people who want to come in and get shown around the station. The website gets hit a lot more than that. I think that we are still exploring the best ways to update content and reward people who are coming back on a regular basis. I don’t think our current website, personally, does a very good job of that, which is partly a design thing and partly a systemic thing. But we are giving a lot of thought to how to improve it. The main thing that I think has become a truism for the Triple R website is that people want to be able to access content and we are making slow progress with how to make that easier for them. One of the other methods that I didn’t mention when talking about the various ways we are retooling content for digital delivery is just simply targeted audio archives. So you can get a podcast of a show, you can go back and listen to it via Radio on Demand, there are some specific things, because not everybody wants to trawl through an entire show or go exploring for ‘was it last week that they did that radio interview or was it the week before’ but if they can go to the audio archives and there it is all neatly presented for them. And we’ve got stuff going back and we’re digitalizing something like 400 live to air performances that we’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years that haven’t been available and we’re going to make them available. Increasingly we’re doing live to air performances from the performance space, which is an inbuilt venue we’ve got in the building now. We’re just getting our heads around whether to and how to start presenting video from that so do we want to live stream it or do we want to just have it available for people to go and look at afterwards, what’s the best way of presenting it, what quality are people after, all that kind of stuff.
What is radio on demand?
It’s essentially a service that lets anybody go back and listen to the show that they want, whenever they want. Via either a website on the desktop or via a mobile phone or a tablet. At this point we’ve got about 5 months worth of shows and the space to basically keep shows for the last 12 months. You can listen to it at high quality as well as, not low quality, but low bit rate if you want to depending on your connection.
What’s radio on demand’s aim?
It’s there for a range of things broadly speaking, one of the things we’ve noticed with people’s expectations, particularly of how they engage with a station online is essentially there is now an expectation that people can engage on the platform they want, when they want and it’s something that all broadcaster media has had to deal with. The rise of on demand services, catch up services for tv are meeting exactly the same kind of expectation that it’s no longer adequate to expect your audience to be able to tune in when the program is being broadcast live to air. So there was a range of things that the on demand service was put in place to cater to. It originally came out of when I was doing shows and people would say ‘I used to listen to tht regularly but now I’m doing blah blah when it’s on so I don’t get to hear it anymore’ and I wanted to fix that. And there’s also a range of shows that I don’t get to listen to because there are particular times when I am unable to be anywhere near a radio. It also functions as a way for me to explore the range of programming that triple r actually does so there’s a number of shows that I’ve now become a regular listener to that I’d never actually heard before because I wasn’t’ able it.
Does radio demand detract from live shows?
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s just an adjunct. It allows people to engage in another way with the content that the station producers so some people will continue to want to listen to live when they’re available, when it’s available for them to do that. One of the strengths of live radio is its immediacy and for some people that’s going to remain an attractive proposition. But the ability to stream live, which means you don’t necessarily need to have access to the radio so you can listen to the station wherever you are in the world rather than just Melbourne. We do a range of podcasts so you don’t necessarily have to be online to listen to a particular program if a podcast is available for that you can download it and take it with you or the ability to go back and listen to a show whenever you want. They are all just added methods they don’t take away from the core strength of what the medium is about. I always find it kind of interesting that there are people that will describe the fact that radio is audio only as a weakness when in fact being audio only is one of radio’s greatest strengths because you’re not necessarily tied to a screen you can do other things while it’s occurring. I’ve heard people say a number of times particularly when things like podcasting started that live radio is effectively dead and let’s just say that those people have been proved wrong on a number of occasions. The core strength of radio remains exactly what it’s been for the last 70 or 80 years.
Do you have any statistics about how many people who listen to programs aren’t actually in the local community?
We know for instance how many hours a week or a month people are listening to the live stream. But it’s harder to pin down whether those people are in a work place somewhere in Melbourne where they’re not allowed to have the radio on so they’ve got their headphones on at the computer and they’re streaming. Or whether in fact they’re somewhere outside Melbourne. About 50% of the streaming traffic is Australian and 50% overseas. That 50% is very obviously not in the local community but the Australian traffic is a bit harder to pin down. I would say probably about 50% of the Australian listenership is probably not in the local area but it’s an estimate. We know there’s about, and you kind of interpolate this down from the amount of data that’s used, so we’re doing about 5 terabytes of data a month, which means it’s about 80 thousand listener hours a month. We don’t know at this point whether that’s 1 person listening all day verses a number of people tuning in for one program. Without more detailed stats and analytics than we’ve currently gone it’s hard to pin that down. We’ve got much better stats and analytics running on the Radio on Demand stuff but that hasn’t been running very long so our analysis on that is still in it’s formative stages. There’s a lot of people going and having a look at the radio on demand stuff and they’re listening but I suspect that because we launched it very softly, because I didn’t want ten thousand people jumping on all at once (because that’s a really good way to kill a server) it is one of those things that I’m seeing grow week by week. So when people first started talking about it on air there was a spike in traffic as people went to have a look but not everybody that was going to have a look sat there and listened to an entire show. Each week it’s been running I’ve seen the data use grow so more and more people are coming back to it and listening to shows which is good because that’s what it’s there for.
So do you feel that audiences were always quite active in their interaction with radio broadcasters or do you think that’s a development?
I think it depends a lot on the station, to be honest. Station’s like Triple R and other community stations to varying degrees have a much more direct interaction and contact with their audiences than some of the more obvious commercial broadcasters. It is something we talk about a lot that unlike many stations you can always pick up the phone, dial the station and you’re quite likely to actually get straight through to the person who’s putting the show to air. That is not always the case with some other stations. We’ve always had and we’ve always been lucky enough to have a pretty engaged audience. One of the things I’ve been saying about social media is that stations like Triple R have actually been doing social media for about 30 years. Just not online. And it is very much not all one way traffic compared to traditional broadcast setups. We’ve got a very passionate listener base, we’ve got a very passionate subscriber base, they are not backwards in coming forwards about stuff they like or don’t like, which is great because it’s a level of constant feedback that we’re comfortable with and it is actually what we are about. And if we’re fulfilling our brief then we need to be in pretty regular contact and engagement with the audience.
Do you think it’s because you are providing local content that’s relevant to them or because of technological accessibility?
I think the bulk of it is because of, I still feel that radio works best because it’s local. There is something about national broadcasters that to me feels less engaged directly with the people they’re broadcasting too because they have to be relevant to an entire country and a large set of locations. But to me that makes them slightly less relevant to all of those locations. So I think that that’s a big part of it. We do a fair amount of engagement with new delivery platforms but also because of the size of the audience, which is really significant, we’re not always right at the bleeding edge. So to illustrate that because of the size of Triple R’s audience which is - numbers in the hundreds of thousands. So when we were setting up a live streaming service we couldn’t do it with the capacity for 25 people to listen concurrently, we had to do something that was much higher spect. And what that usually means is when you don’t necessarily have the monetary resources to do that is it takes a while to put in place arrangements to cater for 5 terabytes a month and so forth. And similarly with the On Demand stuff, on a personal note, I’ve been wanting to this for about 7 years but 7 years ago we relocated from Fitzroy and for the next 4-5 years every cent was going into the building and so we just didn’t have the money to put into developing it and there wasn’t anything off the shelf that would do what I wanted it to do. So we just had to wait until we had better resources and at this stage with many fingers crossed, I’m very pleased with what we’ve come up with but it’s taken us a while to get there.
So about the website how regularly to you update it and how important it is?
Daily. I think it’s very important in the sense that it’s basically our new front door. So we get a lot more people visiting the website on a daily basis than coming through our actual front door, even though we do have a sort of general open access for people who want to come in and get shown around the station. The website gets hit a lot more than that. I think that we are still exploring the best ways to update content and reward people who are coming back on a regular basis. I don’t think our current website, personally, does a very good job of that, which is partly a design thing and partly a systemic thing. But we are giving a lot of thought to how to improve it. The main thing that I think has become a truism for the Triple R website is that people want to be able to access content and we are making slow progress with how to make that easier for them. One of the other methods that I didn’t mention when talking about the various ways we are retooling content for digital delivery is just simply targeted audio archives. So you can get a podcast of a show, you can go back and listen to it via Radio on Demand, there are some specific things, because not everybody wants to trawl through an entire show or go exploring for ‘was it last week that they did that radio interview or was it the week before’ but if they can go to the audio archives and there it is all neatly presented for them. And we’ve got stuff going back and we’re digitalizing something like 400 live to air performances that we’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years that haven’t been available and we’re going to make them available. Increasingly we’re doing live to air performances from the performance space, which is an inbuilt venue we’ve got in the building now. We’re just getting our heads around whether to and how to start presenting video from that so do we want to live stream it or do we want to just have it available for people to go and look at afterwards, what’s the best way of presenting it, what quality are people after, all that kind of stuff.