adambowie.com

Just a note to say sorry to anyone who spent time commenting here and then saw their words disappear into a black hole claiming I'd be moderating. Something broke, and to be honest it's all sticking plasters and Sellotape behind the scenes. Anyway, I think it's working again. And I've put live what comments I've got from the last few days. I fear I may have lost a few though.

I should note that I only played with settings because I was getting a torrent of comment spam, most of which was getting posted come what may.

In the medium term I need to work on migrating this blog onto a more up to date blogging platform - and that's almost certainly Wordpress. And then I can also employ a more up to date commenting system.

In the meantime, here's a photo I took recently.

A new look Flickr has been unveiled today (or last night). It seems to be part of Marissa Meyer's attempt to make Yahoo more relevant. And of course Yahoo has also just paid an awful lot of money for Tumblr. Yahoo is a company without the letter "e".

What follows is based on some very limited time spent using the new look site, and what immediately comes to mind for someone like me. I should first say that I've been a Flickr user since 2005, and currently have upwards of 10,000 photos on the site. That doesn't represent "all" my photos however. I tend to treat Flickr as a site to show off the photos I want made public or shareable. My own NAS archive has upwards of 100,000 photos to put that in perspective. And there are still many photos and negatives that don't exist in digital form.

In general I find the new look better. Gone are the white spaces, and every centimetre of monitor space is handed over to photos. Perhaps it's a tad over-zealous, but it's better than what we had before, which seemed unchanged since I became a Flickr member.

Photos by default are now on a black background - a lightbox view. This works well with my photos, and I have no objections. However, I do think that users should be able to choose between white and black. If I were an illustrator, or use predominantly light/pale colours in my photos, white might suit them better.

I don't actually mind too much that descriptions, tags, EXIF and comments are below the fold. Perhaps this will have a knock on effect with the community aspect of Flickr, but I still like the maximised use of space.

In places the new look feels a bit rushed. There are signs of the old website still here and there. If they really did rush this redesign then they've done well to make it as smooth as it is. There are some rough edges to be sanded off though. And a bit more flexibility from a user perspective wouldn't go amiss.

The big thing is that they've giving everyone 1TB of space for their photos. There's no two ways about it. This is a lot. They've done what Gmail did when they launched against Hotmail, and blow their rivals out of the water with regard to space. Google had only recently made a big issue about their unified 15GB of space. This is a clear retort to that.

But if everyone gets 1TB, then why would I pay for "unlimited" space? Well the "Pro" account is going. I've paid $25 a year for nearly my entire time on Flickr. And my 10,000 photos in JPG format wouldn't take anything like that amount of space. So in many regards, the space doesn't really matter because nobody (well, hardly anybody) is going to use it. But free does introduce ads. So Flickr is now offering a $50 option to go ad-free. I believe that I'll be "grandfathered" on my $25 account - which includes stats as well. But would I pay $50 to remove ads? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure that Flickr would earn anything like that much from me. It feels a bit high, and I'm not sure I understand that part of the model.

I certainly don't understand their "Doublr" option which gives me 2TB for $500! OK, anybody who needed that amount would clearly have more than 1TB and therefore be in the top 0.05% of users in terms of space used. But $500 is absurd. If you're using that amount of space then you really shouldn't be using Flickr for your photographic needs. In any case, there are much better options for that kind of storage in the cloud at much better prices. I can only assume it's some kind of psychological device to make consumers believe that they're getting $500 value for free with their first terabyte.

You would imagine that even now, Flickr engineers are making it very easy to send photos to Tumblr blogs (there is a Tumblr button already). The marketing message of the "1TB of data" seems to be that we upload every photo we have to Flickr rather than just our selects. Then sharing specific pictures to social media or a Tumblr blog is where we curate? In any case, say you have an interest in steam engines. In amongst your regular photos you probably have a few steam engine specific photos. Sharing those to Tumblr where your steam engine enthusiast friends can see them makes sense.

I must admit I've never quite "got" Tumblr. The long lists of people who "like" or "reblogged" things never entirely makes sense. And does "reblogged" mean "steal"? I'll stick with this blog thanks!

Allied to all this, there's a very decent upgrade to the Flickr Android app, and overall I'd say that they're on the right path. I think the service still needs some tweaks and clean-up. But it's heading in the right direction.

Whether coming weeks and months make me regret anything I've said here remains to be seen...

[Update] One more obvious problem is the constantly unclickable footer of the homepage! As you scroll down to click on it, more photos load. It needs to be moved!

And I'm a little confused about the whole "stats" thing. It's being sold as something "Pros" get. But it's not mentioned in any of the now available plans. So if I join up today and pay nothing, $50 or $500, it's not clear that I get any stats. To be honest, I'm not sure that this should be considered that special! I'd expect any site to give me that kind of granularity. You get it on YouTube for example.

When I was up in Derby earlier in the year for the Format festival, I ran across Leicester Lo-Fi Photography . They were helping people build their own pinhole cameras. So I made one using an old Coke can.

I put this camera, gaffer-taped to the wall by the window where I sit, and left it for three weeks. This is the result.

That streak across the top is probably some Coke that hadn't been completely drunk. A bit of a shame, but this truly is a basic camera - photographic paper inside the camera with just a pinhole letting light in. The photo has been inverted and flipped to get the correct perspective.

In the background you can just about make out the BT Tower. Interestingly, in the foreground is a building that started to get clad in scaffolding while the camera was out. But you can barely see that because it was only there for roughly half the time.

Anyway, a very successful first attempt. I need to make some more now!

Over the weekend, CNN published an interesting US-focused series entitled "The future of music radio" that looked at the current state of play in US music radio.

While the US is very different market to the UK, it would be very complacent of the UK radio industry to completely write off what's happening there.

Do you remember rock 'n' roll radio? - Takes a pretty broad look at the challenges facing radio, and the changes that have been made.

The kings of the radio: All-time great DJs - "US" is missing from the headline, although this is a US site. But a useful primer of who has gone before in American radio.

Radio's last stand - Some audio to accompany the other pieces looking at one of the few major market stations that isn't part of a big group.

Who needs radio? I'll take the Web - Something nobody in radio wants to read. This isn't always true for everyone. But it's true for some.

Clear Channel chief: Technology 'an opportunity, not a risk' - An interview with Bob Pitman of Clear Channel.

Photos: A dose of independent radio.

You may agree with some of this. You may disagree. But it's worth a read anyway.

And while I'm linking to US radio sites, there was also a very interesting piece examining audio meter usage in the US and contrasting it with things like FitBits and Jawbones - those little tracker meters that you carry around to measure your activity. Given that it's in your own interest to carry the meter to measure your walking and so on, it's scary how little people truly do carry them. The authors wonder whether this is indicative of how many radio hours are being "missed" with people meters.

I've updated the previous entry, but I thought it was worth giving London an entry of its own because not only have I added back a Motion Chart of the London marketplace, but there's significantly more data underlying it than I've managed for the national chart.

Now you can examine the marketplace in lots of sub-demos including age groups, socio-economic class, sex and digital listening.

That all makes for plenty of interesting trends over time. Examine the growth of digital listening in the capital, with Radio 4 leading the way. Or see how once upon a time, Kiss had 15-24s to itself, but in recent times Radio 1 and Capital have improved in this area, while Kiss has seen its share fall. Or see how Radio 4 is serving more 65+ year olds than ever before (well since Q1 2000 when this data starts).

Lots to play with.

And for a bigger-screen experience, look at the larger version.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 31 March 2013, Adults 15+.

Disclaimer: These are my own views, although they're based on work I've done for Absolute Radio, and through whom I get access to the data. I also sit on the RAJAR Technical Management Group representing commercial radio. Just so you know.

It has been a big radio week already with the Sony Radio Academy Awards on Monday. And next week will be big with the final Competition Commission ruling on its attempted takeover of GMG's radio assets.

But let's look at the latest RAJAR which is released today.

At first glance this quarter might look less than spectacular with few obvious stories emerging at first glance. But that isn't quite the case.

First up is Radio 2, a station I recently described as a behemoth. And it continues to be just that, with yet another set of record reach and hours this quarter. Nobody really knows if there's any way of stopping it. Chris Evans gets increased figures as a result (up 2.9% on the last quarter) and close to one in three UK radio listeners listen to the station at some point during the week. That's quite scary given the breadth of radio we have on offer in this country.

On the other hand, Radio 1 has had something of a tumble. It's seen reach fall 7.5% on the quarter and 7.9% on the year, but it's also seen time spent listening drop 9.1% on the quarter and a massive 20.1% down on the year. It's one thing if a small station falls to that extent, but Radio 1 is the third most listened to station  in the country, so that kind of swing is very significant. Indeed Radio 4 is now bigger than Radio 1 - something that hasn't been the case in the past. And that's not because Radio 4 has grown especially (it's flat on the quarter and up 4.4% on the year). I'll return to Radio 1 in a while. 

It may seem self-serving to list my own employer near the top of what I hope is a fairly unbiased report on RAJAR, but it's true to say that the Absolute Radio Network has had some really good figures seeing its overall listening hours reach a record level, up 9.2% on the quarter and 22.6% on the year. To put that in perspective, you'd have to go back to 2001 to find a time when the team at One Golden Square (then Virgin Radio of course) had more hours. 

This growth has been driven by its digital stations. Absolute 80s has close to its biggest ever reach and hours, in turn seeing it overtake other large digital commercial stations like The Hits, Smash Hits and Planet Rock. Absolute Radio 90s also has record high figures, and nearly all the other services have contributed. In a week that saw Christian O'Connell pick up two Sony Golds, he's also had a decent increase at breakfast.

Elsewhere Classic FM has had a good quarter, while Talksport has had a so-so one with reasonable hours, but a reach that has now firmly slipped below three million. 

Radio 3 has had a decent quarter with double digit growth on the year, while Radio 4's performance has been solid as mentioned above. Five Live has good reach, but time spent listening seems to have fallen off recently. They've just had a bit of a schedule shake-up of course.

6 Music and Radio 4 Extra haven't managed to maintain their reach momentum, although 6 Music's hours are at a record high.

Disappointingly, the gap between the BBC and commercial radio has been widened a bit, with the BBC now having 55.7% of listening compared with commercial radio's 41.9%. 

Across the groups, Global is flat on the quarter in terms of listening, while Bauer at first glance seems to have had a good performance, up 4.5% on Q4 2012. However, this growth is due to its new ownership of Planet Rock, and indeed without it, its share would have slipped a fraction.

In the Midlands, the Orion group has turned in decent quarter on quarter numbers, and Jazz FM will be pleased with its hours.

What about breakfast? Well Chris Evans aside, the attention tends to fall on Nick Grimshaw, and the instant novelty of him taking over has rubbed off a little bit. It's early days of course, but he's down just over 900,000 listeners on the previous quarter are 1.3m on Chris Moyles' numbers this time last year. Time spent listening is particularly bad for him year on year - perhaps a product of the vast amount of speech there used to be in Moyles' show.

In London, the correct answer to the question "What is the most listened to breakfast show?" should always be the Today Programme on Radio 4. And that remains the case with very nearly twice as many listeners as its next nearest competitor, Radio 1. Dave and Lisa are just behind that, maintaining their advantage in spite of the station's overall disappointing performance. Heart and Magic have done reasonably, but Kiss is the big faller this time around losing 18% of its audience on the last quarter. Interestingly, Christian O'Connell gets significantly more listening than all his commercial competitors with the exception of Capital despite being further down the table in terms of reach. Those who listen, listen a lot!

Let's get on to digital. The first quarter each year usually sees a decent upturn in digital listening since DAB radios remain a very popular Christmas gift. And that's still true with now 34.3% of all listening being digital, up from 33.0% last quarter. What's more 26 million people or 40% of the population listen to digital radio every week - an increase of 2.6 million on last year.

Last time out, I said that we should keep an eye on internet listening as it jumped up quite a bit. This quarter, for the first time, internet listening has reached 5.0% and is level with digital TV listening. Clearly with lots more smartphone and tablet ownership, along with improved radio apps and streaming services, more and more radio is being delivered over IP.

In London, it hasn't been an altogether good quarter in commercial radio. While All Radio listening is essentially flat (down 0.3% in listening hours on the previous quarter), listening to commercial radio is down 3.4% on the last quarter and 5.0% on the year. The BBC meanwhile has gained some, but not all, of that listening.

That's why we've seen the big London commercial stations all take hits this quarter with Capital, Heart, Kiss and Magic all seeing declines in listening hours, especially if you look at year on year performances.

Global will be especially worried about Capital and Heart. Both have just over 9m hours, but in each case, that represents the lowest listening figure they've ever recorded since the current RAJAR methodology began in 1999. Indeed, in Capital's case, you probably have to go way back into its 40 year history. There are bright shoots over at Xfm, but it's not a good picture.

Indeed, the BBC has overtaken commercial radio in the capital in terms of listening share. While this has happened before, traditionally London has always been stronger for commercial services.

(Interestingly, "Other Radio" listening is up 44% on the quarter in the capital. That is listening to non-RAJAR measured stations including community and internet radio services. It's up on a small base, but "Other Radio" is up from 2.1% of listening to 3.1%)

Let me just return to Radio 1. There's an issue here with its results, and it's something I return to all too often. Radio has to work harder to keep younger listeners because it's losing them. Over the past five years, overall radio listening has stayed essentially flat (up 0.1%), but amongst 15-24 year olds it has fallen 16.9%. And if you look at 15-19 year olds it has fallen further - down 29.4%. The chart below goes back further than 5 years, but you can see the picture.

Look at the same chart for Radio 1 listeners. Over the same last five years, Radio 1 has seen listening fall by 38.1% amongst 15-24s and 40.9% amongst 15-19s.

By the way, I'm certain that both BBC, and indeed commercial groups that have stations that target this demographic, are doing what they can to stem the flow. It's in their interests after all. But we can't pretend that YouTube, Spotify, Rdio and now Google, aren't all having some kind of effect on radio listening. We need to try harder as an industry.

Finally, let's get back to my usual Google Motion Chart which I've updated again.

The first is the national picture. Although I've now increased the space on this blog which allows these charts to be bigger, I'd still recommend that you play with the larger version of the chart.

[Update]

I've added back a London version of this bubble chart. You may find it easier to use the larger version, but it's worth noting that there are a few more demographics in the London version of the chart including ages and digital listening! So do play with the different variables available and don't just stick with the default state which usefully displays Reach v Reach %.

For more on RAJAR visit:

The official RAJAR site

Radio Today for a digest of all the main news

Media UK for lots of numbers and charts

One Golden Square for more Absolute Radio details

Paul Easton for analysis

Media Guardian for more news

Matt Deegan usually has plenty to say

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos-MORI/RSMB, period ending 31 March 2013, Adults 15+.

[Amended to correct a fact about Absolute 80s]

Woods from Adam Bowie on Vimeo.

Shot as an excuse to try that tracking feature you can do in After Effects. Music chosen because I saw Philip Glass play later that evening. The tracking was done with a Mobislyder, and the video on a Sony RX100. If there's one thing I'm coming to realise about the Mobislyder, it's that a cool hand and plenty of attempts are required to get good motion. That's particularly the case if you're focusing closely. It's also hard to get the speed right.

So last night in a hot and sweaty room where the tables were just that bit too close together, this year's Sony Awards were handed out.

Absolute Radio did rather well, and I suspect that there may be a few sore heads around the station today.

Most of the press seems to be leading on John Humphrys for his interview that dovetailed into the BBC DG resigning. But I think it's fair to recognise BBC Radio 5 Live as the overall Station of the Year, especially in an Olympic year. I think they really did capture the mood of the nation over those two short weeks.

Eddie Mair's star continues to rise with a win as Best Speech Broadcaster of the Year, and Issy Suttie's comedy win is well worthy of it. There's a new series from her that's just started on Radio 4 which, along with Down The Line being back, is an unmissable comedy strand right now. Richard Herring won bronze incidentally - I think the only non-radio award of the evening.

Richard Park won the Special Award for an incredible run over nearly five decades in radio, while Steve Lamacq won the Gold award for his contribution to music radio.

The Today Programme was somehow adjudged (see, you can use that word outside of football!) better than Christian O'Connell and Chris Evans - not a decision that would be easy to make. Metro won the Battle of Tyneside, and Classic FM won Brand of the Year.

I really don't like new "Sony Golden Headphones" Award - which I'm not sure counts as a Sony Award proper. I suspect that it was introduced to broaden the appeal of the Sonys amongst the public at large. The idea is that it was a popularity contest and every presenter in the country was able to win it. Except that was never the case. It was always going to go to someone on a big station (sorry local commercial radio presenters), and it was always going to go to a winner who could "get out the social media vote" (sorry presenters not fully utilising this or forced to use a station generic Twitter/Facebook account). So the fact that the first winners are Dan & Phil from Radio 1 - perhaps the most "hooked up" presenters on the biggest youth orientated station in the country, isn't a surprise. For all I know, they're brilliant. But popularity contests don't belong in the Sonys. They become the equivalent of the TV Quick awards or something.

The full list of winners is here.

And yes, I'll put up my complete list of winners in the next few days to put it all in perspective over the longer haul.

Here's a curious thing.

The new Ben Wheatley film, A Field in England, is getting a truly multi-media launch on 5th July, by getting a simultaneous release in cinemas, on DVD, on video-on-demand and on the free-to-air Film4 channel!

Having enjoyed both Kill List and Sightseers immensely, I'm really looking forward to Wheatley's paranoid fantasy set during the English Civil War.

And I'm also really interested and excited by new distribution mechanisms. I've written frequently on the pain of watching films in multiplexes where customer service can be poor, and nobody really cares if your enjoyment is spoilt by fellow patrons. So giving me a choice of viewing opportunities is an interesting idea.

We've seen similar releases to this before. Ken Loach's Route Irish got a Sky Box Office release, and lower budget horror films often get a very short cinema release - sometimes just a weekend - to collect some publicity ahead of a Monday DVD release. Curzon has its On Demand service that lets those not lucky enough to live within easy travelling distance of an arthouse cinema, watch some films on demand at the time of their cinema release (more titles please!).

What's different here is the free-to-air Film4 broadcast. While Film4 isn't an HD channel anywhere aside from Virgin Media currently (coming soon to Sky though?), and it has advertising breaks, I'd have thought this singular route might severely impact on the others.

Yes, some will want to watch the film at the cinema with a live Q&A link-up - the Picturehouse chain is another great little chain (even though it's now in bigger hands). Others might like to own the DVD for their collection. But I can't for the life of me think of a reason why someone would pay for the video-on-demand transmission over the free-to-air broadcast. I suppose you might not be in on Friday night, or you may have neglected to schedule a recording on your PVR.

I'll be really interested to see the results of this, although I can't help thinking that they won't make quite as much money as they might. That said, you have to experiment, and cinema is certainly going to have to adapt to survive into the future. Assuming that we want to see more than Iron Man XXIII etc.

Is the quality of the video we're being served on the news decreasing over time? I rather suspect it is.

What am I talking about? Well go back to last Wednesday morning, and watch BBC Breakfast. This is a programme with a significant viewership and sizeable resource. But one of the items on the programme was about an interview and a book that Amanda Knox has written. We were shown a recorded report on what she had been saying, and then went live to BBC reporter Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. Bowes was sitting in a studio wearing a suit and was miked up.

However the pictures and sound seemed to have been delivered via IP and the quality was similar to what you'd expect from Skype on modest broadband connection. That is to say, the video quality was not even SD (never mind HD) and there were lots of interruptions and cutting in and out. There were also sizeable delays between the Salford studio and remote location making conversation difficult. And this is coming from one of the biggest cities in the US.

In recent weeks I've seen similar types of connectivity from places like Reykjavik to Sydney. I've just seen similarly poor-quality video from another major US city - Cleveland.

Look - I understand that if the pictures are coming live from some war torn part of the world, or the correspondent is undercover somewhere like Zimbabwe, the pictures will not be great.

But satellite technology is smaller than ever, and if Sky News is able to broadcast live footage of one of its reporters being "arrested" and taken away in a van from Tiananmen Square, then I'm sure that in a major western city with all its connectivity, we are capable of getting better pictures. And ironically, while pictures from Cleveland were low-quality, the same bulletin had a perfect HD satellite link-up with Islamabad in Pakistan.

I realise that budgets are being cut, and when the technology works well, IP can be an excellent solution for delivery. But given that the average size of televisions is getting larger and larger, and we're moving from HD to 4K, the idea that sub-SD internet footage is acceptable is just wrong. If connectivity is not robust enough and of decent quality, then lets not go around ditching satellite just yet.