Public radio, and radio in general, is at risk of disruption by new audio technologies (podcasts, etc). However there are interesting opportunities when a longer-term technology-strategy view is brought to bear. This presentation is from an invited talk at the Australian ABC Radio National ( August 2009) as part of their strategic process. Here's how they describe themselves: "With over 60 distinct programs each week, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National is different from any other radio station in Australia. Where else could you hear, for example, an exploration of ideas in science, followed by the latest in books from around the world, then a program about the mind and human behaviour?" http://www.abc.net.au/rn/

1. An invited talk given to ABC
Radio National staff.
(http://www.abc.net.au/rn)
11 July 2009
The Audioverse in your pocket:
A listener’s views on ABC Radio
National, the mobile internet
and the future
Dr Michael Harries
@michaelharries

2. Consider a future where every phone or car “radio” streams
The future
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.

3. 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 like
2. What people who listen to similar
music to you like.

4. Why listen to me?
I work for Citrix, a
global software
company.
Citrix = IT as a Service
Delivery
Controllers
Receivers Repeaters Gateways
SSL 001000111010101 SSL 001000111010101 SSL 0010001110 10101 SSL 0011010101000111 SSL 00100011
On the At the At the network In the
endpoint to branch to edge datacenter
simplify and “amplify” for secure to control the
enhance the delivery for access to delivery
user branch applications and process
experience offices desktops of application,
server and
desktop
resources

5. Citrix technologies are
broadly used in
companies large and
small.
99% of Fortune 500
200,000 customers
100M Corporate Users
75% of Internet Users
Engine of Cloud Computing
Top 5 SaaS vendor

6. Citrix is unusual in having a
technology futures
organization managed from
Sydney. I am part of that Citrix Labs:
team. Sydney, Redmond, Cambridge

7. 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 ...

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

9. 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.

10. 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).

11. “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.

12. Let’s start with the
state of play today.
Today ...

13. 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.

14. 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.)

15. 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 ...

16. ... 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”.

17. 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.)

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

19. 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
Twitter the content Google generally indexes.
Web/Google

20. Twitter Radio
Web/Google
≈ Text/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!)

21. 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).
U
Shape of the future

22. 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!

23. 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.

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

25. 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.

26. 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.
“... 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

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

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

29. http://amazon.com
uses a more
sophisticated method
...

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

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

32. 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)

33. 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.

34. For every VISITOR
- Pages visited
- Podcasts downloaded
- Likes and Dislikes ...
For every LISTENER
- A custom experience
- A SIMPLE experience
All this is straightforward and - A changeable experience
achievable.

35. 1. You already have
Great content (radio and web)
2. You should be
Adding ‘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 future
Personalized, audio-only content ‘browsing’ across the
ABC RN world of content

36. "Prediction is very difficult, especially
about the future."
--Nils Bohr
@michaelharries
michael@technoist.com
michael.harries@citrix.com