BBC Could Get iTunes-Inspired Radio Service

BBC listeners could get their own iTunes-inspired personalised radio service, according to BBC director general Mark Thompson, who was speaking last night at the Cambridge Radio Festival.

Thompson said the broadcaster, under the working title of MyBBCRadio, would utilise peer-to-peer and other new technologies to create a service that would “provide thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by the audience themselves, all of them based on the extraordinary wealth of existing BBC content, but as relevant to individual users as the playlists they assemble for their iPods.”

The BBC’s existing RadioPlayer, which allows consumers to access programming from the past week, has been a success for the Corporation. The player, together with podcasting experiments, is changing radio listening habits.

“To create new ways of finding radio content, new entry points beyond the radio dial to ensure that those… for whom radio is often an afterthought, find compelling music and audio on the platforms which are front and centre for them,” Thompson said.

The moves are likely to further anger commercial rivals, who fear that the BBC is unduly skewing the market. Thompson criticised claims that Radio 1 and 2 should be privatised.

“If anyone seriously believes that floating two new formidably popular advertising-funded national radio networks is going to help the rest of the commercial radio industry, they really do need their heads examined,” he said.

“To expect the narrow market failure argument to be taken seriously by policymakers or the British public is to misunderstand the way in which public service broadcasting has developed in this country.”

Yesterday, local radio firm UKRD said in a letter to the director general, that the BBC was damaging small commercial stations so much through competition that it should compensate them by funding their public service broadcasting.

In the letter UKRD chief executive William Rogers attacked the BBC’s “growing commercial approach” and accused it of being determined to “dominate local markets by ruthlessly cross-promoting its services using public money”.

“They wouldn’t know a real funding or income problem if it smacked them across the face,” he said.

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