How digital is taking radio into the 21st Century was perfectly summed up in a presentation by two key figures from the UK radio industry at the recent Radio Days conference in Sweden.

The focus of the BBC’s James Cridland and Global Radio’s Nick Piggott is to take radio to the same standard as the amazing media devices that people now own. Phones, mp3 players and so on all have screens which display useful information such as artist, title, album artwork and so on. What digital radio can do is take this to a whole new interactive level with very real commercial possibilities.

Much of their work centres around a DAB radios ability to display text and EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) information. The text display is great for “now playing” information, short advertising messages or additional information on what a person is hearing. The EPG is an extended version of this allowing for station schedules or detailed information to be displayed. Both are essentially small text files that take very little extra headroom to broadcast. It’s what you do with this information that leads to hugely exciting possibilities.

Imagine a radio EPG that works like Sky+ on your television. Suddenly you can browse station schedules and find programmes or stations you wouldn’t normally hear. Better yet, with a simple record facility, you can set your radio to record the programmes and then listen when you want. Time-shifting for radio. Brilliant!

Also exciting is a small facility called “tagging”. It’s the simplest idea in the world. When you hear something interesting, you press one button to tag the information displayed on the screen then come back to it when you have more time.

Research from the BBC and the UK’s Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) shows quite high usage rates for the existing, quite basic, text display on DAB radios. Further research shows that with the right combination of spoken word and text display, understanding and recall can increase by 30%. Put these together and think of it in a radio advertising context – 30% higher recall. Now we’ve got something very very valuable.

There are other massively exciting developments going on. FileCasting is essentially the mass broadcast of podcasts for on-demand listening on a DAB radio sets and DAB/WiFi hybrids are beginning to come out allowing for a return channel from the listener to the broadcaster. What better way to track how many actual people hear your station … in real time!

James and Nick have kindly made a short pdf available of their presentation which is a great read and you can download it here.

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