A look ahead

This year's Multimedia Meets Radio event will highlight the opportunities and challenges facing broadcasters as radio moves firmly into the age of interactivity and choice. EBU members who have embraced technologies such as podcasting, weblogs and internet radio players will share their experiences and present their vision of the future.

The legendary founder of the BBC, Lord Reith, famously defined the mission of public service broadcasters as to inform, educate and entertain. This has not changed, but now the era of "auntie knows best" is over and broadcasters are also expected to listen.

Even in Reith's day, the success of the media depended on its ability to create a conversation among a community of listeners. Broadcasting is still about creating conversations, except that broadcasters have become part of the process: fully-fledged interlocutors rather than benign observers. In large part, this is because phenomena like weblogs and podcasting empower audiences by giving them a direct channel to the programme-makers.

While it is premature to dismiss schedules as a thing of the past, as some commentators have suggested, the fact remains that consumers finally have some say in how, when and where they listen. But this is just a beginning as broadcasters look for ways to overcome hurdles, such as rights issues, in order to broaden the range of programmes they can make available on demand.

These and other concerns will be the focus of a weblogs and podcasting workshop on Friday 24th March. Speakers will include the BBC's Kevin Anderson, Holger Hank of DW-World, Judy McAlpine of CBC and Jonathan Marks of Critical Distance.

MMR kicks off (this is a World Cup year) with a joint radio-TV session on the synergies of cross-media productions. It will look at the strategies and tools that broadcasters are using to harness the complementary strengths of radio, television and the internet in order to bring added value to their customers.

The radio only session on Thursday afternoon will take in two very different topics: radio in post-tsunami Asia and the technology of internet radio players. On Friday afternoon, delegates will find out how some broadcasters have combined the Reithian tenets of informing, educating and entertaining in a single production.

Among the many highlights are a website that crosses a Big Brother-style format with a documentary about apes, a multimedia encyclopaedia and a game to make young people aware of gender issues. MMR 2006 promises all this and more.