The BBC iPlayer app: treating radio as second-best

Daniel Danker, the BBC’s iPlayer boss was interviewed about this on PM/Radio 4 on Tuesday.

See 48 minutes in

When asked by Eddie Mair about radio downloads not being in the iPlayer app he said:

“There are 3 excuses. About 90% of radio listening is actually live but you’re right. Not a good enough excuse ..There’s a lot of right issues, with radio particularly around music…and we still have podcasts so you can still download, but the truth is they are all excuses so in reality we are focusing on bringing radio into the download space very soon.…As soon as its ready we will bring you that”

Thanks, Jem.

As I make clear above: there are no rights issues with the BBC’s current offerings via podcast: and the tech infrastructure is simple to implement (simply RSS and MP3 downloading).

Top of the Pops 2 is downloadable on the new BBC iPlayer app, and therefore rights issues are difficult to fathom, but I do understand that full seven-day availability for radio downloads could be difficult to achieve. However, the most popular “listen-again” material is speech-based anyway (whether it’s Chris Moyles or The Archers), and it’s hard to understand why this has any rights issues at all, given the availability on unprotected downloads.

Danker is right to just point out that they’re “excuses”; but it’s sad that he has to make excuses for treating radio as second-best.

It’s not only iPlayer. The new(ish) Sky+HD interface has some bugs with displaying the now & next programme information for radio channels. Radio channels are also completely missing from the Sky+ iPad App channel listing.

As you’ve said many times James, I suspect that this is due to the relative lack of interest in on demand radio compared with television.

Since the inception of downloads on the desktop iPlayer, radio has been excluded, and I don’t know if anyone’s particularly shouted about it thus far. There’s no real reason – although additional rights agreements may be needed to be made with the various copyright bodies and unions. But the’ve been concluded for television, so radio should be straightforward. However, the current agreements which already allow 7 day streaming may suffice.

I believe DRM is required for some categories of radio. In particular the BBC Trust talked about classical music and book readings being excluded from podcasts in 2007, and I think those categories remain in place. So directly implementing the podcast feeds is probably not a straightforward solution (in any case, the iPlayer version of a radio programme and the podcast version can and do differ). Of course that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be able to download a DRM protected version of last night’s Prom to listen to offline, as much as I could stream one online.

Yes, 90% of radio is live. But downloads are specifically for those situations where you can’t get a decent internet stream – on the tube or a plane, as an example. In this situation, 100% of radio listening is downloads.

I, too, believe that DRM would be required; and I also know that sporting rights, rights around drama, and of course music rights, all need to be sorted for downloads of radio. (The iPlayer for TV doesn’t include great swathes of BBC output for that reason).

But there are hundreds of excellent downloads of radio available now, all rights-cleared, via the BBC’s podcast service. This can be directly implemented in a straightforward solution. The links between Scott Mills’s radio show and his podcasts are already there – take a look at the bottom right of this page. If the metadata’s already there… ?