I’ve just come back from CES, and one of the overwhelming impressions I’ve had is that screen displays get better and better every year. There are many devices with beautiful UI – but radio within them is a bit of a boring, 97.3-like affair.
Radio has to compete with visually-rich media on the same device if it isn’t to look old-fashioned and boring. But there again, we need to ensure that we get these visuals right – nothing worse than, as I see in many European countries, a few TV cameras shoved into a radio studio, so we can watch the breakfast producer picking his nose.
The BBC is trialling, this week, a visualised radio player which is allowing us to experiment with the content on these platforms. It has a number of different ‘modes’, from the inevitable live video stream to other interesting ways of dealing with listener feedback.
I’ll help myself to another super-strong coffee, and try and stave off the jet lag – while my Creative Director, Yasser Rashid, takes up the story on the BBC Radio Labs blog if you’d like to discover more.
Tagged: visual glanceable radio