Fatcontroller

I want to tell you about Olinda. The name was dreamed up by schulze & webb from an Italo Calvino novel (and by the way a Brazilian city). Olinda is fundamentally a way to help us think about what a future radio could be. Olinda is a physical prototype, it’s a way of explaining concepts that make more sense than a powerpoint presentation or a lengthy document and a way for the BBC to share it’s thinking in an open way with the wider community. It’s social hardware. The heart of olinda is about exploring the way that IP could work with a broadcast channel in a complimentary way rather than the current norm of simple additional choice, which shouldn’t be knocked but is radio 1.1 in it’s ambition.

There’s more detail here but the essence of the proposition in this first incarnation is about a modular radio that allows for social listening – connect via wifi and get notified when your friends are listening and tune in to their station. There’s some clever stuff at the back end, RadioPop, which uses attention data to provide a whole host of opportunities to complement radio listening.

the back story

Radio used to be a shared experience, it was a piece of furniture with warm valves that the family would gather around. This changed with the transistor, which for the first time allowed for a personal listening experience – rock & roll rather than the organist returns, portable rather than fixed.

and we all know what happened when it was possible to have an even more personal experience with our music…photo credits: silver, blue and green regency TR-1’s copyright Dr Steve Reyer. Pink TR-1 copyright Eric Wrobbel

MarkCuban had a BFO, a blinding flash of the obvious. He set up broadcast.net so he could hear his local texas basketball game when he was out of state. Add on the ability to tune in to the local police communications and it set him on his way to eventually owning the team he wanted to keep in touch with.

KPIG got into the game early, closely followed by Virgin Radio, where i cut my teeth, with the admirable assistance from gavin starks and his team at virgin.net

I was lucky enough to be around when the first standalone internet radio device was released, it was late 1999 when Jim Gable and his chaps brought out the Kerbango, a fixed line internet radio that was unfortunately an idea before it’s time – a combination of lack of broadband penetration and lack of faith from 3Com, but still a case study in how to provide a reliable, transparent service for listening to radio across the planet.

photo james cridland used under licence.

the arrival of wifi internet radio, which coincided with the BBC on demand offering. access to 10,00 internet radio stations is all well and good, but at the end of the day most people listen to a max of 4 radio stations for 95% of the time. Being able to listen to what you want when you want was definitely a step in the right direction.

Recently we have seen the first combined DAB and wifi radios, Revo’s Bliq is here now and we’ll see a range of combined products later in the year from more established radio brands.

let’s move away from the idea that broadcast and IP radio are mutually exclusive and move closer to the idea that certain technologies in certain bands can compliment each other. There are a whole range of economic and practical reasons why this makes sense.