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Radio is pretty linear. By linear, I mean that your content is only really designed to be played out once; then you move on and it is all but forgotten.

So how do you make this compatible with this crazy new internet-age, where this isn’t the case at all?

Technical Background: The BBC, along with EBU, are working on a system called ORPHEUS. Its end goal is to build a studio that almost automatically does this for you. However, this is going to likely take decades to trickle down to smaller broadcasters, so there’s no reason we can’t work on our own solution in the mean time. This post hopefully outlines some of the requirements such a system actually needs. Some of this is somewhat-plagairised from a presentation I saw at a conference, but we’ve elaborated a bit more on the ideas to make them a bit more realistic.

Linear radio looks a bit like this:

1. Create a show plan and work out what you want to discuss
2. Perform your show on air, probably not sticking completely to the plan.
3. Evaluate how you think it went, get feedback from others, etc.
4. Repeat.

Creating content for, say, YouTube, looks rather similar:

1. Create a plan for your short, and work out what you want to discuss
2. Record it, probably multiple times
3. Edit the raw video down, add titles and graphics, etcetera. Make small improvements, perhaps by refilming a segment.
4. Publish the video
5. Look at the analytics and possibly comments.
6. Repeat

(For a podcast, you can probably follow the same steps as above, but without the video)

So, it’s clear that the thought processes are pretty similar. But how can you take a radio show and put it on social media?

Well, first, you probably want video to go with the audio. The ideal solution here is an easy thought: record some video at the same time as audio in your logs.

The next thing is a bore: rights management. If you use beds, the license for them may not cover social media. If you catch the intro or tail of a song in a link, you can’t use it. So, we need a way to remove content that could be infringing – or we could somehow license it for YouTube. The latter is operationally hard, so we’ll go with the first and engineer it into our system.

Next, you need to actually be able to locate the segment you want to share. But how do you find it in the recordings amidst songs? You then need to be able to work out when to start and when to end the video. Naturally, you could select a whole link here if it’s not crazy long. We need a way to be able to work out when in the video.

So, three things we need to consider to make internet-ready content:

1. Video to go with your audio output – how do we make this video good?
2. Editing the original mix to subtract content – where do we even start doing this?!
3. Locating where our target links are in this video – how do we find the position of our content?

The next series of posts will look into how to solve our three problems. We will look at 2 first, as the solution provides many benefits.