Bowblog

A remarkable story about Victorian platform innovation Radio is in flux. First-wave digital platforms are in danger of being eclipsed – even before they’ve achieved anything like full adoption. Second-wave platforms are evolving fast but usable over-the-air IP – a kind of holy grail – is probably years away so radio stations are investing in [...]

You might want to know: I work at BBC Radio but these are the opinions of a civilian radio nut and not those of the BBC. I’ve developed a bit of a radio crush on a new station called Amazing Radio. Amazing‘s a national digital station mounting a head-on challenge to the music radio status [...]

Radio 3 have improved the quality of their live online stream – it’s an experiment called #PromsXHQ (‘XHQ’ for Extra High Quality). For the final week of the Proms you can listen at 320kb/s AAC: a big improvement but not, on the face of it, a big deal. I think it’s important, though.Why? 1. It’s [...]

There’s a big quarterly departmental meeting at BBC Audio & Music Interactive (which is where I work). We call it the ‘departmental’ and it’s always a pretty big deal – the magnificent Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House is the venue and it goes on all morning, spilling out into surrounding conference rooms for smaller sessions. [...]

Cory Doctorow’s got this wrong. He’s having one of those slightly hysterical moments that only someone who really understands technology can have. The technically naive idea that streaming and downloading are different things has got him all wound up: “But they’re the same thing! They’re the same thing!” I can almost see him stamping his [...]