Networking in Ireland

marno21

Spin South West has recently begun taking Spin 1038's output from 10-3 and 7-12 daily with just breakfast and drive produced locally.

Given the coming recession, advertising crash and the general decline in radio listenership - is networking inevitable in Ireland? The News Corp owned Wireless Group seems prime to begin such activity with similar stations within the same group (96/Live95/FM104 and Q102/LMFM/C103).

I find it amazing these days that Leitrim has more local content on its ILR service than Liverpool (Bauer have announced that Radio City Talk on 1548AM is to close, leaving the networked Greatest Hits on 105.9 and the main Radio City 96.7 having 4 hours of local output per day)

turbocab

marno21 wrote: »

Spin South West has recently begun taking Spin 1038's output from 10-3 and 7-12 daily with just breakfast and drive produced locally.

Given the coming recession, advertising crash and the general decline in radio listenership - is networking inevitable in Ireland? The News Corp owned Wireless Group seems prime to begin such activity with similar stations within the same group (96/Live95/FM104 and Q102/LMFM/C103).

I find it amazing these days that Leitrim has more local content on its ILR service than Liverpool (Bauer have announced that Radio City Talk on 1548AM is to close, leaving the networked Greatest Hits on 105.9 and the main Radio City 96.7 having 4 hours of local output per day)

the beginning of the end for music driven radio ,the youth and 20 somethings have gone from fm to spotify etc never to come back,

radiotrickster

I think youth stations need to expand and look beyond being a radio brand. They should work more on developing content for social media, look into videos and work on becoming a multimedia brand that also makes great radio.

This has been done in Scandinavia with youth stations. Get people to love the brand online and they’ll be more inclined to listen to the station.

radioguru02

radiotrickster wrote: »

I think youth stations need to expand and look beyond being a radio brand. They should work more on developing content for social media, look into videos and work on becoming a multimedia brand that also makes great radio.

This has been done in Scandinavia with youth stations. Get people to love the brand online and they’ll be more inclined to listen to the station.

Interestingly, it’s the pirates who have started doing this
Ome in particular run club nights for example and seem to be building a brand through it

end of the road

networking of course is nothing new in ireland, both i radio services have been sharing programming, since not long after i 105 107 launched i believe.
shannonside northern sound since the early 90s.
i think possibly midwest and the defunked northwest radio may have shared programming, i am sure i remember hearing jingles mentioning mid to northwest radio the odd time i managed to pick one of them up but i can't remember for the life of me which station, the transmitter was around the 102 mark i think anyway but it's a long long time ago.
it's certain we will see increased networking of stations in ireland going forward.

end of the road

pirateradiohed wrote: »

Interestingly, it’s the pirates who have started doing this
Ome in particular run club nights for example and seem to be building a brand through it

this is actually nothing new really.
pirates have been running club nights since dance music as we know it began, other pirates also run nights such as those targeting the carabien communities in the likes of the uk and US.
the building a brand via social media also isn't a new thing on a basic level all though the video stream and facebook live features for example have made things more interactive.

radiotrickster

end of the road wrote: »

the building a brand via social media also isn't a new thing on a basic level all though the video stream and facebook live features for example have made things more interactive.

It's not new but Irish stations seem behind with it. A lot of the Australian and UK stations have great social but Irish stations can be lazy, like just posting links to their articles.

Imo, there should be a bigger focus on video, trying to grab the audiences attention. Build the brand online and awareness of the schedule (so people know the names of the presenters on at X time). Over time, people out driving or in the office will turn on the radio and go to that station because they know the person they like from the Facebook videos (or whatever) is on now.

I've seen livestreams where presenters don't actually 'do' anything (just go on and say hi to everyone that joins the chat with bland small-talk) and it's a total turn-off. It seems like social media is something a lot of station do just to be able to say they're doing it.

L1011

iRadio isn't even officially a network now; its one single service with two advertising regions

Spin SW took some Spin content before; RedFM took some FM104 content in the days of shared ownership; and the number of stations that took various DAP shows (the chart as gaelige, the beer sponsored dance show) would really count as networking too - but nothing has been on the scale of the current Spin/SpinSW one let alone the UK norm

Wireless's UK stations didn't network when the entire industry did so I don't think the culture is there.

end of the road

L1011 wrote: »

iRadio isn't even officially a network now; its one single service with two advertising regions

fair point.

marno21

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/pandemic-causes-surge-in-losses-at-rupert-murdoch-s-irish-radio-stations-1.4575069

Between this and Bauer entering the market there's a bumpy road ahead here. If Wireless' stations in leading markets are doing poorly I can only imagine the slaughtering the stations in lesser markets are taking.

KildareP

When you look at Wireless Group's station portfolio, the Irish operations really stand out.
Their UK stations are all speech and personality driven.

Their Irish stations are all formatted music-driven stations.

I'd wonder the likelihood of seeing some cross-trading going on between Bauer and Wireless. Bauer are much more involved in music-driven operations (Kiss, Cool, Magic, Absolute, Hits, Greatest Hits, etc.) Could we see Wireless perhaps taking Newstalk and Today FM (Irish TalkRadio and TalkSport/Virgin Radio type operations) from Bauer and with Bauer taking on the music-driven stations from Wireless?

Of course, there's a real long term danger that the end result will be widespread networking, which isn't just going to see regional stations being fed everything from Dublin, station operators could just as easily decide to go a step further and have the networked content coming from London or Belfast with "localised" links played out at each individual station.

Global are an example of this in action, with prerecorded "localised" links inserted by the presenter into each individual station log across the network mixed in with live network-wide links to give the impression Pandora is sitting up the road in Heart's Yorkshire studios in Leeds responding to Gemma down the road's text, not sat in Leicester Square presenting on Heart London which is being relayed to 12 other stations around the country. Same principle could be applied here too...

end of the road

i think networking to irish stations from england is unlikely if i'm honest, especially now because of brexit.
possible, in terms of technology at least definitely, in terms of regulation, i would say no, whatever about irish regulation, certainly the EU would probably stop such a move given it would be a non-EU member relaying content to an EU member, but that is just speculation on my part.
what we might see happen is networking between NI and ROI stations alright, because while NI is technically not within the EU, it is in a situation where it has special arrangements, and it is on the island of ireland, but again that is just speculation on my part.
but maybe there is precedent for networking from a non-EU member to an EU member?

KildareP

end of the road wrote: »

i think networking to irish stations from england is unlikely if i'm honest, especially now because of brexit.
possible, in terms of technology at least definitely, in terms of regulation, i would say no, whatever about irish regulation, certainly the EU would probably stop such a move given it would be a non-EU member relaying content to an EU member, but that is just speculation on my part.
what we might see happen is networking between NI and ROI stations alright, because while NI is technically not within the EU, it is in a situation where it has special arrangements, and it is on the island of ireland, but again that is just speculation on my part.
but maybe there is precedent for networking from a non-EU member to an EU member?

I suppose it's reliant on what the BAI permit. I can't help but wonder though that Bauer and Wireless will be thinking about how much they are able to consolidate their output and will push the BAI as hard as they can get away with.

Not sure that the EU would have much involvement as broadcast regulation is typically a member state competency. The regs only require that a station that wants to broadcast within Europe has a European registered company behind it, but what that company chooses to broadcast is essentially fair game. So Bauer UK couldn't buy a radio station here that is run entirely from the UK, it has to be registered as a company here and comply with our company law but, BAI aside, nothing stopping it sourcing all of it's programming from the UK.

Case in point, albeit not radio, is a huge chunk of Virgin Media's TV scheduling, both live and recorded, relies entirely on ITV and in the case of live output is often nothing more than a clean-feed of the ITV network playout passed through as is.

98FM previously ran Ryan Seacrest's syndicated show in it's evening slot, localised for 98FM - admittedly it's not networking in the true sense of the word, given it's prerecorded and packaged specifically for non-live distribution, but it's only a step away from "live" networking.

Networking amongst different countries does happen elsewhere in Europe, for example, Fun Radio in Luxembourg networks it's breakfast show from the French equivalent (and parent owner) from Paris and has on occasion networked off-peak and weekend programming from Paris too.

Ruggabugga101

KildareP wrote: »

Global are an example of this in action, with prerecorded "localised" links inserted by the presenter into each individual station log across the network mixed in with live network-wide links to give the impression Pandora is sitting up the road in Heart's Yorkshire studios in Leeds responding to Gemma down the road's text, not sat in Leicester Square presenting on Heart London which is being relayed to 12 other stations around the country. Same principle could be applied here too...

The example of Heart lt is a good one given they ditched all their breakfast shows and networked that last May. Do people listening to those stations really think anything is local any more?

Whilst Breakfast is networked, drive ln heart is live and in some mzrkets some heart stations actually closed as they were merged.

Networking has been happening in New Zealand (similar population to here) for easily a decade if not more. Ireland does seem behind although in the NZ example they have way more frequencies than here. They must have about 8 or 9 national networks between two operators. They go head to head in the same genres.

Read something a few years back saying people didn't care if daytime wasn't live and local, as long as breakfast was...not sure how accurate that actually is.

marno21

Joel Corry’s 2 hour weekly mix show on Kiss FM (Bauer owned) is now going out with Spin branding on Spin1038/Spin SW on Fridays at 6pm. Cuts Limerick Spin SW output to 7 hours per day now.

You’d wonder if Bauer are eyeing up any of the other 3 youth licences (iRadio/Beat/Red) to network Spin onto those. Spin SW must have quite a reduction in cost base with the volume of programming coming from Dublin and London.

Ballycommon Mast

Out of the 3 I reckon Iradios shareholders would be the most likely to want to sell now.

radiotrickster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118482989#Comment_118482989

Why would you say that? I'm genuinely interested as networking seems like the future.

Ballycommon Mast

Iradio is owned by an number of local business people who might think like Denis O'Brien that now is a good time to get out before the value of the FM licences fall further. Des Whelan who owns 75% of Beat isn't going to retire just yet and Red Fm is slightly different in that it's not really a youth station and Niall Prenderville is still bringing in the cash

Declan A Walsh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118485473#Comment_118485473

I thought that Red FM was the youth station for Cork.

end of the road

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118486311#Comment_118486311

it is, but they have effectively abandoned that audience and are going with a more fm104 like format.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118485473#Comment_118485473

Beat's ownership is the other way around, the Irish Times own 75%. They also own some of Red as it happens.