The Audioverse in your pocket:

A listener’s views on ABC Radio National, the mobile internet

and the future

Dr Michael Harries

@michaelharries

An invited talk given to ABC Radio National staff. (http://www.abc.net.au/rn)

11 July 2009

The futureConsider a future where every phone or car “radio” streams podcasts live from a global pool, where your device is smart enough to know and adapt to your preferences.

For me, the device might immediately stream the latest NPR ‘All things considered’, then transition to BBC news. I ask it instead to play a children’s program (as I’m driving with my kids) so it finds and plays the very most popular children's program globally at that moment.

This future is already here for music; Last.fm and Pandora are applications that select music based on:1. Similarity to the kind of music you like2. What people who listen to similar

music to you like.

Citrix = IT as a Service

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Receivers

Delivery Controllers

In the datacenter

to control the delivery process

of application, server and

desktop resources

On the endpoint to simplify and enhance the

user experience

Repeaters Gateways

At the network edge

for secure access to

applications and desktops

At the branch to “amplify”

delivery for branch offices

Why listen to me?I work for Citrix, a global software company.

99% of Fortune 500

200,000 customers

100M Corporate Users

75% of Internet Users

Engine of Cloud Computing

Top 5 SaaS vendor

Citrix technologies are broadly used in companies large and small.

Citrix Labs: Sydney, Redmond, Cambridge

Citrix is unusual in having a technology futures organization managed from Sydney. I am part of that team.

And the reason I care about Radio National is that I grew up with my parents playing ABC Radio on car trip; whether on short trips to Garie Beach, in the Royal National Park, NSW, Australia ...

Lots of audiences... or on the long holiday drives from Sydney to Adelaide.

Technology Strategy

1. Where are we now?

2. What will the world look like in the future?– How do we want to play?

3. How are we going to get there?

Part of my role at Citrix is technology strategy. This is about ensuring that strategic choices are compatible with the technologies of tomorrow.

Radio National should be going through exactly this exercise.

Two books that have shaped my thinking are: 1. Innovators Dilemma – how well run

organizations can find it near impossible to respond to certain types of change.

2. Blue Ocean Strategy – about finding new uncontested opportunities, rather than following the crowd into direct competition (the red ocean).

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where

the puck is going to be.”

Wayne Gretzky

In a nutshell: technology strategy is about having a view on how the ‘game’ will change – and building assets that meet the challenges of that future.

Today ...

Let’s start with the state of play today.

Great radio

Great web presence

...

Radio National is well known for amazing quality content and has built an incredible web presence.

I also love that it’s still possible to listen on this 1954 transistor radio.

Lo

Love the podcasts...

Where are the archives?

Podcasts are an acknowledged strong point – with an amazing presence on the Australian iTunes.

(But I’d like to see MUCH more historic content.)

User Driven content

I love the experimentation with user driven content. This ranges from the pool – calling for mash-up creations of all kinds to blogs like http://Kerriejean.com that have garnered the most incredible level of audience participation. This is important, and a large part of the story. Yet, for me ...

... the RN experience is mainly about my daily commute. It’s what I do when my hands and eyes are busy, but my ears are available and I’m looking for “brainfood”.

For me, and probably many other listeners, the killer differentiator for radio content is that you don’t need to look or to type.

(Experiments with audience contributed content and multi-media remain critical –you need to explore and stay fresh. This listener would love to hear regular audio programs that draw from the outcomes of these explorations without needing to visit on the web.)

Technologies

Change is the new normal. Let’s look at some of these changes.

TwitterWeb/Google

Observation1: Twitter is the hype technology of the moment; it provides the ability to micro-blog the moment, and, as a result, content has a very short half-life.

Twitter is very different to web pages and the content Google generally indexes.

TwitterWeb/Google

RadioText/Libraries

≈This relationship is much the same as the difference between live radio and traditional text and libraries.

Yet – the amount of innovation around twitter is astonishing – with very little around radio... Is that because the medium is harder to index? Novelty? (I don’t know!)

U

Shape of the future

Observation 2:The iPhone changes the game! That is, it’s not necessarily the device of the future, but it certainly shows the way. Ubiquitous internet connectivity, contextual sensitivity, easy downloads, ambient applications (for more see my deck on future of the mobile internet).

Tech Adoption for the masses

=Simplicity

Observation3:The iPhone is also a tremendous lesson about simplicity. Unless something is push button simple – utility-like, consumer adoption is very hard to achieve.

Online radio (the podcast) is still, by and large, too difficult for the masses!

Future Radio?

Putting these observations together.1. I see a future “radio” with permanently internet-connected

devices providing the audio content I want, when I want it, with the same simplicity achieved by today’s radio. I see some of the ‘twitter’ enthusiasm applied to building these audio offerings.

2. I also see an opportunity for networks like ABC Radio National to bring today’s audience into that future by offering a personalized – “curated” – program of quality ABC programming for EVERY user.

website

Stated differently, the audio only experience will offer all the choice and customization of the browser experience. This has certain implications.

Website/Station Rules

• Minimize Bounce

• What’s the next most interesting thing

The first implication is the goal of keeping people on your site or station for as long as possible by making it easy and appealing to navigate though your site –either with clicks – or, for the ‘audio only’ experience – by asking the user for voice commands.

“... related stories and related videos ... were up on the top. ... <the reader> is now looking at the bottom of the page with nothing to do.“

-- Marissa Mayer, VP Google

To this end, Google’s Marissa Mayer recommended (to newspapers) putting links to ‘suggested next articles’ immediately after the text of each article.

Today you can’t do this with a podcast, but there’s no reason this can’t change – at least to offer a stream of audio, personalized, or optimized for the listener.

There are great precursor technologies already available demonstrating what’s possible.This is http://digg.com.

Digg recommends links based on votes (diggs) from it’s audience for each link. Diggoperates on the basis of universal popularity across the whole Digg audience.

http://amazon.comuses a more sophisticated method ...

They build their recommendations from the behaviour of people like you.

Finally, http://last.fm is an online radio.

Last.fm finds other people who also like your music collection and makes recommendations on that basis.

In short, user profiling is a well known technique for building recommended media. (also known as crowd-sourcing)

Lots of audiences

These technologies can be used to make sure that ABC RN survives the disruption.I'd like ABC RN to be available for long drives for many years into the future.

For every VISITOR- Pages visited- Podcasts downloaded- Likes and Dislikes ...

For every LISTENER- A custom experience- A SIMPLE experience- A changeable experienceAll this is straightforward and

achievable.

1. You already haveGreat content (radio and web)

2. You should beAdding ‘listen next’ for all content

Building expertise with automated collection of crowd-sourced preferences and groupings of listeners

3. Prepare for the radio of the futurePersonalized, audio-only content ‘browsing’ across the ABC RN world of content

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

--Nils Bohr

@michaelharriesmichael@technoist.com

michael.harries@citrix.com