Prague Conference Reveals the Future of Radio
On 17 and 18 October, a two-day conference on digital broadcasting and multimedia was held by Czech Radio in association with the European Broadcasting Union. Over 100 representatives of media companies from across Europe had their meeting in Prague. They all agreed that radio is a modern medium with a promising future.
In his opening speech, the Director General of Czech Radio, Peter Duhan, said that a public service radio has to be universal in terms of the employed technologies. In the case of the Czech public service medium, this implies that along with digital broadcasting, it has to search for other means of extending its own content. One of them is a systematic training of editors instructing them how to complement public sources such as Wikipedia with relevant information obtained in the course of production of radio programmes. Czech Radio also plans to offer its sound recordings in the form of a shared player, which may be embedded in the users’ own websites. The inspiration for this came from Swedish radio.
A representative of the British commercial radio for kids, Fun Kids, introduced a low-cost radio station, for which digital broadcasting proved to be a successful business model. He believes that digital broadcasting offering new services is the inevitable development step: “If radio broadcasting fails to change, listeners will find interesting sound content elsewhere,” said Matt Deegan with reference to services such as Spotify, iTunes Radio or TuneIn. The station’s revenues come not only from standard business opportunities, but also from new sources, such as their own YouTube channel with advertisements.
Norwegian colleagues had great success with the digital clone of their main station, the content of which is identical with the FM broadcasting, only coming in different music packaging. In only two weeks’ time, Norwegians bought up all digital receivers to be able to tune in to the NRK P1+ station. It thus became the sixth most popular radio station, with an audience of about 200 000.
The afternoon session of the conference included a presentation of an experimental play produced by BBC, whose story unfolds differently in different parts of the UK. After that, Czech Radio introduced its European colleagues to its activities in the field of multimedia.
On the second day, the focus turned to the role of multimedia in radio broadcasting, with presentations, for example, from the representatives of German WDR or Dutch NPO. The representatives of Belgian RTBF shared their experience with the launch of their youth station that has cameras broadcasting live from its studio.
The international conference entitled New Radio Day and the Friday’s Network & Learn programme was hosted by Czech Radio as part of the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of its broadcasting. For more information please visit the website of the conference.
MSc. Zora Karmazín Blümlová
Communications and External Relations Director
Czech Radio
Phone: +420 221 551 310