Absolute Radio was reporting live to the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show from the ‘Two Years To Go’ event at the impressive Olympic Stadium earlier this week, and we were even fortunate enough to get interview with Lord Coe live to air.

A live broadcast from a site such as this poses some problems, mostly that it is not a completed structure with the facilities and connectivity that you would get at a completed venue. As such the Technology team at Absolute Radio had to think carefully about the method of relaying live audio from the stadium to the studios at One Golden Square, balancing cost, reliability, quality and ease of use. Broadcasting from large metal objects, such as a stadium, causes particular problems for any wireless equipment as there are lots of reflections and ‘sash’, but in this case it was the only option.

The team considered using a Nera M4 satellite kit and a long run of Cat5e cable to connect the ISDN codec in the stadium with the satellite kit that could be outside of the main structure with a clear view of the sky and they also considered using a 3G IP codec, although previous results with 3G connectivity have not been encouraging. However, they eventually opted to use a new piece of equipment that was supplied by a company called Wired For Sound, who have an inventive way of combating the inherent problems with 3G networks.

The equipment, known as the ‘Mediahub’, comprises of three 3G modems that can act independently and across a variety of different networks, providing a much more resilient connection to the Internet. For our broadcast we opted to use three different networks, O2, Vodafone and Three (which performed the best by far, if you’re interested) and a TieLine IP codec, with built in mixer facilities for our microphones and headphones, that connected to a matching TieLine unit at One Golden Square. The ‘cool bag’ sized over the shoulder Mediahub, with 3G aerials built into the case, is battery powered and is able to run for around four hours, or it can be powered from the mains or even a car battery.

The main benefit of the Mediahub is the networking that it is capable of. For audio traffic (provided by the IP codec) it can be configured to send the exact same packet across all three mobile networks to an assembler, at a wired location (such as your office) with lots of connectivity, where it will only take and use the first correct packet that arrives. This therefore means that the networks with the most latency (which changes dramatically with usage on a 3G network) are not used, and you always use the fastest packet – this facilitates a much smaller buffer size on the IP codec, meaning that round trip delay is kept to a minimum and that a two way interview can then be conducted. Quite often with 3G networks you lose throughput entirely, and this kit copes with that nicely, considering it’s ‘first correct packet’ scheme that doesn’t mind if only one correct packet is ever received. The unit even comes with a laptop (separate to the over the shoulder bag) that allows you to monitor the state of the networks, allowing you to see signal strength and the quality of the network.

The Mediahub also has another few clever tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, it has the ability to multilink 3G networks for data traffic, separately to diversified audio traffic. We know that for voice it will diversify packets across all three networks, but for data traffic it will combine the three networks to give you effectively three times the throughput than a standard 3G connection. Wouldn’t it be really excellent if you could then connect a laptop to the Mediahub then and transfer audio via FTP, access emails, etc? Well that’s the second trick that this nifty piece of equipment can do – it has a built in wireless hotspot allowing you to do just that.

We used the equipment for the full four hours that the battery could handle and found it to be very reliable and hugely cost effective compared to using a satellite kit at roughly £5 per minute. The ‘Mediahub’ also has a bigger brother that features more 3G modems and an ADSL modem, which is perfect for more established venues where using 3G is a backup to a wired connection.

Wired For Sound can be contacted on +44 (0)20 8880 4840, or alternatively can be found at their website.

- Stuart Edwards

Absolute Radio is the most advanced digital radio station in the commercial sector, and we’re committed to transparency and accountability. We’ve pioneered the release of monthly digital engagement metrics as part of our duty to clients in a digital age, and we remain the only UK commercial radio station to publicly release streaming, and on demand, listening hours.

The Absolute Radio network of brands recorded 6.6 million streamed hours of live audio in June, an increase of 5% from May, 2010.

Ahead of next week’s RAJAR, this includes figures for Absolute Radio 90s, our newly launched DAB Digital radio station, which is the first sign of the success it’s had since launch.

On demand listening is a huge growth area for the station which rose in June to 1.9 million hours, which is a 12% increase. This not only opens up our valuable content to be consumed when it’s most convenient for listeners, but it’s also an attractive and pioneering proposition that can be ‘owned’ by commercial partners. And this is currently in the marketplace with advertisers.

Absolute Radio has also reached over 3 million podcast downloads in June, which is up 60% from the previous month, alongside 325,000 Youtube views, which is also up 60%. The increases can be attributed towards the successful Baddiel & Skinner World Cup campaign, which incorporated podcasts, live shows, digital content, and a live event strategy.

This month, figures for the Absolute Radio mobile downloads include 284,000 downloads on Nokia’s mobile platform. In May we reached one million downloads across four platforms: Nokia, Apple, Android and BlackBerry.

Absolute Radio is working hard across the radio industry to ensure we provide consistent figures. The statistics are gathered using actual listening data and associated information accessed via internet radio devices, mobile phones and computers. It also includes data recorded by the use of cookies for internet visits.

Manic Street Preachers – (It’s Not War) Just The End Of Love (13th September)
The Manics have hit a rich vein of form since 2007’s ‘Send Away The Tigers’ album – and this is a classic Manic Street Preachers track. It’s the first song from new record ‘Postcards From A Young Man’ (20th Sept) – the follow-up to last year’s excellent ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’ album. And there’s more great singles to come. Straight to the A-list.

Vampire Weekend – White Sky (16th August)
The New York 4-piece lift another lovely song from their ‘Contra’ album
Hear live tracks from the band’s headline set at Latitude at Absoluteradio.co.uk.

Fyfe Dangerfield – She Needs Me (6th September)
To follow Top 10 smash ‘She’s Always A Woman’ Fyfe returns to ‘She Needs Me’, from his album ‘Fly Yellow Moon’. Watch Geoff Lloyd talk to Fyfe about the album in an interview recorded in January this year at Absoluteradio.co.uk

When Media Week announced its 30 under 30 list, it was revealed our very own Luke Moore, Head of Sponsorship made the list after being narrowed down from more than 120 strong entries. Luke has been at One Golden Square for nearly ten years after joining the team for work experience, and it’s clear how well he has fitted in within the company.

There pretty much isn’t a job Luke hasn’t had at Golden Square, from joining as Work Experience, to becoming a Runner, Luke went on to became a member of the Sales Team as a Sales Planner. Within three years he became an Agency Account Manager before moving into the Sponsorship department in 2006 to become the Sponsorship Account Manager. Within his first year in the Sponsorship team, Luke secured a massive deal with Hyundai as the World Cup sponsors, giving away 40 pairs of tickets and flights to see the matches in Germany.

Within all of the job positions, one of Luke’s most memorable moments was working with Russ Williams as the producer of Rock N Roll Football for 6 years as he not only organized the Premier League Cup to come into the studio but also some unforgettable Cheerleaders!

This year’s World Cup saw Luke secure mobile phone giants Sony Ericsson, as the official sponsors of the hugely popular Baddiel & Skinner podcasts. With Luke’s well known love of football (even if he supports Ipswich), we all know at Golden Square how well his passion to the sport has proved his commitment to securing these deals.

Chris Goldson, Commercial Director, is certain of Luke’s capacity as he says ‘Absolute Radio’s sponsorship credentials are widely viewed as second to none, Luke is the reason’. With a highly anticipated secured deal with the new sponsors of the Premier League rights, exciting times are ahead for this rising star.

We have some exciting news for you – our line-up for our Barclays Premier League programming.

These broadcasters are the back-bone of our new football and entertainment coverage: Rock & Roll Football, a mix of goal highlights and punditry, will remain alongside a new feature; Rock & Roll Football ‘Live’, the station’s exclusive 3pm Saturday afternoon Barclays Premier League Football commentary. This will be broadcast on the station’s newly launched service Absolute Radio Extra – the pioneering premium ‘red button’ style content service on DAB Digital Radio, 1215AM and online in the UK.

Joining our station will be former Arsenal and England footballer and much-loved radio and TV broadcaster Ian Wright MBE, esteemed football commentator Jim Proudfoot and respected voice of football, our very own, Russ Williams.

Our new Barclays Premier League programming on Saturday afternoons, which kicks off on Saturday 14th August will look like this:

• 1.30pm: Absolute Radio Extra. Russ Williams will anchor the station’s pre-match build-up from 1.30 – 3pm on Absolute Radio Extra.
• 3pm – Absolute Radio. Russ Williams will host Rock & Roll Football in a new slot between 3pm and 5pm on Absolute Radio, as well as fronting the station’s Rock & Roll Sport Podcast. Russ has previously been the host of Sky TV’s Soccer AM as well as providing commentary on ITV’s Premier League football coverage.
• 3pm – Absolute Radio Extra. Jim Proudfoot will hold the mantle of match commentator from 3 – 5pm on Absolute Radio Extra exclusively. Proudfoot’s credentials include commentating on Sky’s Premier League highlights programme ‘Goals on Sunday’ and ‘Football First’ as well as Setanta Sports and EPSN Sports. Jim was the lead Champions League commentator and the principal commentator at the 2010 FIFA World Cup for talkSPORT.
• 5pm – Absolute Radio & Absolute Radio Extra. Ian Wright the former England and Arsenal forward and respected radio and TV broadcaster will anchor post-match commentary and analysis from 5 – 6.30pm on Absolute Radio and Absolute Radio Extra, accompanied by Jim Proudfoot, Russ Williams and guests. Since his retirement from football, Ian has featured as a pundit on BBC Sport’s International Match of the Day as well as appearing on the panel for Euro 2004 and the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. Wright also co-hosted the Drive -Time slot on talkSPORT with Adrian Durham.

The Live commentary will be co-produced by Independent Production Company USP and Executive Produced by Simon Crosse. USP produces all of the BBC’s Formula One coverage for Radio 5 live, online and for the red button service on BBC1.

We are also proud to say we have a sponsor in place, which we can’t reveal yet but which the commercial team will be able to share with you very soon.

Cat

The Script – For The First Time (5th September)
The Irish trio follow their 2-million-selling debut album with ‘Science & Faith’, released on the 13th of September.

England might not have performed as well as we all hoped but Absolute Radio’s World Cup content & marketing campaign has been a massive success.

We reunited Baddiel and Skinner for a series of exclusive podcasts and live radio shows around the World Cup – Baddiel and Skinner’s Absolute Radio Podcasts supported by Sony Ericsson, Official Mobile Handset of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™. The podcasts saw the much-loved comedy pair in South Africa for the duration of the World Cup with a mix of chat, analysis, news and of course comedy from the football tournament. The campaign produced 20 podcasts and four live radio shows with the pair calling into the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show throughout the campaign.

To kick off the campaign, and to see Frank and David on their merry way to South Africa full of anticipation and hope for England’s performance, Absolute Radio staged a South Africa Send Off Party at the London’s Lyric Theatre with Baddiel & Skinner performing ‘Live and Unplanned’ for the first time in 14 years. Keane, James and The Lightning Seeds also performed at the party in front of an sold out audience the event was the perfect mix of comedy, football and live music.

Over 2.3 million podcasts were downloaded throughout the campaign coming from 268,185 unique ip addresses with each IP downloaded an average of 6.85 files. The podcast reached number 1 in the podcast chart within the first week of launch with five of the top ten episodes in the iTunes podcast chart. The podcasts received great accolade in the press generating huge talkability and they received a 4.5 star out of 5 rating on iTunes – testament to their quality and entertainment value.For the first time, Absolute Radio moved into short form animation, commissioning a series of four animated videos of the podcasts – the first time a commercial radio station has commissioned such a series. The four videos produced 187,000 views/downloads on iTunes alone.

Online at www.absoluteradio.co.uk the Baddiel & Skinner section generated 167,313 page views and accounted for 60% of the traffic for the entire Football section during the period, firmly cementing the website as a football destination prior to the start of 2010/2011 Barclays Premier League season.

Absolute Radio’s campaign provided Sony Ericsson with an exceptional content strand to communicate their key messages with regards to their official partner status as well as their new Vivaz handset. With the campaign led by podcasting, they were the perfect partner as they could directly facilitate the content as well as be associated with it. There was no question come the end of the tournament, who was the hero brand for Absolute Radio listeners when it came to the World Cup.

Sony Ericsson added an extra element to the station’s World Cup campaign by running a competition on the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show to send one lucky listener out to South Africa to watch the tournament and to give his, an everyday fan’s, point of view as well as our two celebrated pundits. The winner, James Roe, wrote daily blogs and recorded a video diary that was posted on both absoluteradio.co.uk and the Sony Ericsson UK facebook page.

The campaign also included a cross media aspect working in conjunction with Spotify with fully branded Absolute Radio and Sony Ericsson audio and online ads.

And finally, Absolute Radio’s Fantasy League game generated 1,463,883 page views from 48,782 visitors with 18,177 teams, 10,582 managers which equated to 155,000 visits and 1.3m page views along with thousands of smartphone application downloads.

by Clive Dickens

The use of RadioDNS brings together broadcast and IP technologies allowing radio broadcasters to maintain traditional methods of mass-market broadcasting, with the enhancement of innovative services allowing further audience engagement.

Something that has our commercial team really excited is the use of RadioVIS for commercial purposes, providing extra value to broadcasters. RadioVis is a RadioDNS based application which provides visualisation.

As you can see in the video below, listening to Absolute Radio or any of our other five services on DAB allows us to deliver through RadioDNS technology, visual content such as live images from our on-air studio, content from our website and commercial messages from advertisers. This content is dynamic and can be updated as quickly as updating a webpage.

The Sensia also allows users to monitor Facebook status updates, the latest tweets on Twitter and the latest weather updates.

It doesn’t reveal specific facts and figures on a station by station basis, but it does provide a really clear overall picture of how radio internet-based services are evolving and being used. Notably, it includes podcasts and listen-again style services, and for the first time with this release, detail about the take-up of mobile phone apps.

RAJAR has highlighted that 20% of smartphone users on the survey have downloaded a radio app. That in itself is a great result, but not all smartphones are the same. While Blackberry, Nokia and latterly, Android have all shown enormous growth in recent years, the most mature “marketplace” or “store” to download apps is that of the iPhone family, including iPod Touch and now iPad. What’s clear is that iPhone users are using data services more than other mobile users (although we’re well aware that this may change).

If we examine the MIDAS data a bit deeper, it shows that 20% rises to 46% amongst iPhone users. In other words, nearly one in two iPhone users who’ve listened to the radio via the internet at some time, have downloaded a radio app. This is obviously fantastic news.

Here at Absolute Radio, we know the popularity of our apps because we can measure directly the number of hours that are listened to via mobile phones, and as our stats show, that number of hours continues to increase.

The RAJAR press release also highlighted the fact that 31% of listeners claim to have ever listened to radio via the internet, and 15% of listeners have ever downloaded a podcast, with half of current users listening at least once a week.

Digging a bit deeper into the data reveals a few more facts.

The number of people who listen daily or weekly to the internet has increased over the last couple of years.

Base: Those who ever listen to the radio via the internet.

And for the most part, people are multi-tasking when they’re listening online.

Base: Those who ever listen to the radio via the internet.

With more people having access to the net, on more computers, radio listening – which is a very complementary to many internet-based activities – it’s not surprisingly on the increase. We look forward to imminent launch of Radioplayer which will hopefully drive this listening further.

Awareness of WiFi radios continues to grow with 15% of people having heard of them. Of those who are aware of them, 13.2% own one. As we see more smart devices like the Pure Flow family of radios, this should continue to grow.

15.1% of all people listen to podcasts (Note: This figure can’t be compared with previous MIDAS releases due to methodology changes).

19.6% of people who listen to podcasts do so every day, a number that has grown quite significantly over time as podcasting has become more established.

Comedy remains the most popular type of podcast to listen to (which will come as relief to Frank, David, Dave, Christian, Geoff and Iain) followed by music and then TV and film.

On average, podcast subscribers subscribe to 4.8 different podcasts, with 35-54s listening to the most: 5.57

But mean numbers can be a little misleading. Some people listen to an awful lot of podcasts, and there’s a long tail effect in evidence. One respondent claimed to subscribe to 51 podcasts, and another subscribed to 99 (I’d poo-poo such figures, but I’ve just had a look at my own iTunes podcast subscriptions…).

As the popularity of podcasts grows, commercial radio stations have to continue to look at ways of monetising them. One question that’s always asked is based around people downloading but not listening to podcasts. After all, podcasting software such as iTunes will automatically download podcasts.

76.4% of people listen to half or more of the podcasts they download, with 25.0% of people diligently listening to every single podcast they download.

And once people start listening they tend to listen to the whole episode. 85.9% of people listen to most or all of every episode they start to listen to.

What’s more, people are happy to listen to older podcasts, with 82.6% of podcast listeners saying that they listen to episodes that are over a week old.

69.1% of podcast listeners listen on their computer while 64.9% listen on a portable mp3 player such as an iPod. 17.0% listen via their mobile phone.

Predominantly, people listen to podcasts at home, although listening while travelling is popular with a combined 44.6% of people listening as they travel.

Finally, 36.0% of people have started listening to radio programmes that they didn’t previously hear as a result of listening to a podcast.

Awareness of personalised online radio services continues to grow. It would be a complacent radio industry that didn’t acknowledge the growth and popularity of services such as Spotify and Last.fm. 41.9% of people are aware of such services, although that figure is very biased towards younger listeners.

That’s really only a subset of the data, but gives you a flavour of how people are using the internet to listen to the radio.

Adam

Note on sample: The RAJAR Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services (MIDAS 6) was conducted during June 2010 by Ipsos MORI. The sample comprised RAJAR respondents drawn from the main RAJAR survey who had claimed to listen to the radio via the internet, or downloaded podcasts, or listened to the radio via their mobile phone. The survey findings are based on 1,083 respondents.