This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.

Radio has always had this incredible, compelling, emotionally rich content, which shares perfectly on social media, except that there is no natural habitat for sharing audio. 

We have incredible interviews and journalism, but no one searches in Google and the answer that pops out is a piece of audio. So, what we wanted to do was take the ninety years of credibility, heritage and craft that existed in radio and fit it for the purposes and platforms and habitats of modern audiences. 

We realised we were part of the technology in most broadcast studios – we had a lot of information and context about what was happening in the studios and we were uniquely equipped with the audio, video and information to do something about solving complexity.

The Bionic Studio started with our technology that was used by broadcasters to engage with audiences whether that was via phone, email, skype, social media, etc. We then added to that intelligent automated camera switching, which was designed to make radio shareable. We then realised we could transcribe it to deliver searchable and discoverable video and audio capabilities to allow video clips to be extracted and then shared or streamed instantly to social media platforms, or to make them organically searchable on search engines.

One of our philosophies is we really need to help broadcasters in the studio to create incredible, compelling and original content. We also have to help that content reach all the different platforms and purposes which it now has to reach and therein, the problem is how to deliver that complex stuff without breaking the speed and simplicity of radio production. The final part is, unless you can measure and monetise that correctly, in the ways that the commercial advertisers and sponsors increasingly want, to compete with digital advertising, and to compete with personalisation, then you won’t have any revenue. No revenue, no listeners or no content. We want to make sure that in the studio, we’re seen as a broadcast tool that helps people create incredible, original content. The tools are meant to be a natural part of the creative process.

We’re always trying to build-in something to extend these current experiences with a view that broadcasters will want to enrich the experience and engagement, with audiences increasingly demanding to consume that content in different kinds of experiences and platforms. 

Dan McQuillin is managing director at Broadcast Bionics

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