I’m at the Berners Hotel in London’s West End. It’s full of podcasters, podcaster wannabes and podcasting newbies.

Chris Kimber Head of Interactive Media from BBC is just talking about the BBCs podcasting efforts. BBC doing well in charts like iTunes. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time is tops among beebs podcasts.

Why it’s important- media consumption is changing, people want more control, on demand and portable. People bother less with live TV, everything is portable, commuters watching DVDs on the way to work.

Is this a threat to radio? It could have been because you can’t control radio, it’s live unless you record it and you can only take live stuff on the road with you. The player changed that, but you still had to be online – podcasting had a big effect. Now, you choose it’s pull not push. On demand means you’re in control of scheduling. Lots of effort has gone in historically which podcasting wipes away. Also full navigation within a programme, you only have to listen to the bit you want and you can listen over and over. But most importantly, it’s portable – you decide where, you can take it with you. These are all simple things, but they are very big changes for tranditional radio.

18 months ago, most people were not listening to radio on their iPod – it was excluded, there was only recorded music, so there were people who used to listen to the radio who left it behind, they are starting to come back. Now associated radio with one of the coolest, sexiest brands there is (iPod).

Interesting by-product is that radio’s become more tangible, less ephemeral. Podcasting makes radio something you can pick up and touch (huh?) Well files anyway.

So what? Increased competition for listeners ears. In the podcast world it’s more of a level playing field, the BBC no longer owns the gateways and commercial radio can no longer control what’s out there.

Podcasting focuses attention on the quality of the programme. so radio station brand is much less important in this space. People stay subscribed if the quality is high enough. So BBC as professional broadcaster is in competition with everyone out there. Chris thinks this is a good thing – competition is good for the beeb. Radio 4 never had any real competition. So as a medium this competition is good for listeners.

Disaggregation of content from brand – Chris Moyles is the brand, not Radio 1. Threat and an opportunity (do we care?) but can offer stuff to people that they might not try in linear space. BBC has had feedback from people saying they would never have listened to a particular programme, but because they’d heard it in a podcast (found in some directory), they have listened and enjoyed.

Now introduced idents. But Chris is struggling with getting the audio working (huge titters in audience) Moving swiftly on…..

In the shorter term the impact is on content in existing programmes and on commissioning of new progs. Knowing that part of a prog is going to be podcast they are doing things differently – taking account that people might not be listening in real time – ie not using commercial music under it or time checks in the middle.

Big Toe Radio Show- speech highlights package (oh dear, the gremlins have got him by the goolies). Aaaaah found that something had become unplugged.

Only a matter of time before a podcaster gets picked up.

How has BBC popularised podcasting – we would have had Melvyn talking about the podcast trial, but the audio still isn’t working – obviously Melvyn gets a few things wrong, and it’s very amusing apparrently.

Chris Moyles reaches millions, pushing people to BBC site and from there to other directories.

Helping to keep radio relevant and regenerated, vibrant, exciting. Could have been a threat, but turned into great opportunity.

tags: podcastcon uk & podcasting & london