BBC gets creative with the future

If you read the papers earlier this week, you might be forgiven for thinking that the BBC had announced the greatest invention since Chillicothe, Missouri, gave the world sliced bread. In a keynote speech at the annual Radio Festival, in Cambridge, Mark Thompson said the BBC planned to allow users to personalize their online listening experience.

Don't get me wrong. I believe MyBBCRadio is a brilliant idea and that public service broadcasters everywhere should sit up and take note.

It's just that we are congratulating the BBC for the wrong reason. There are already a number of Web radio sites that offer customisable programming.

Hats off to the Beeb for adopting their ideas, along with ideas poached from search engines, PVRs, iPods and mobile broadcasting. As somebody once said, the best ideas are common property.

At any rate, this is another step in the direction of what Thompson used to call "Martini media": the idea that listeners should be able to access BBC programmes "anytime, anyplace, anywhere".

MyBBCRadio will be part of the BBC's iPlayer, a free service that will offer seven days of BBC TV on demand. It will integrate the BBC's highly successful podcasts into the Radio Player and if we are lucky, may even offer suggestive services like those of Amazon or iTunes.

Thompson said the service would use peer-to-peer technology "to provide thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves, all of them based on the extraordinary wealth of existing BBC content, but as relevant to individual users as the playlists they assemble for their iPods".

Of course, all this is potentially disruptive for radio as audio converges with TV and Internet content on mobile and other devices. But, as Mark Thompson notes, there is opportunity as well.

Thompson recognizes that the future of radio depends on the ability of broadcasters to increase choice and recapture the lost demographic of 15 to 24 year olds. The Internet has taught this generation to make their own choices:

"Change in the radio and audio landscape means much more than a straightforward transition from analogue to digital linear radio. People are also listening via DSat, DTT and WiFi radios. On demand audio to PCs, with applications like the BBC's Radio Player, and to mobile devices like the iPod herald presage a world in which consumers can pull audio when and where they want rather than waiting for the broadcasters to push it to them."

If you are lucky, you may still be able to catch the webcast of Thompson's speech on the Radio Academy website.