A short presentation on the use of ipadio for citizen broadcasting and citizen journalism during the London 2012 Olympics. Written and prersented by James O'Malley (@ipadio), with support from me in the background.
Hello, today I’m going to talk about how citizen broadcasting tools could be used during the 2012 games to cover stories the mainstream media miss or don’t care about – and how social media can be used to reach niche audiences.
At ipadio and our parent company Nemisys we’ve substantial experience working with both sports organisations and with citizen journalists – so we’re going to tell you how we think 2012 could play out with tools like ipadio being used to cover the games, the cultural olympiad surrounding it and the legacy of the games themselves.Of course, ipadio is also being used out in Delhi during the Commonwealth Games.
I work for a company called ipadio – our core product is a telephony product that enables you to make a call from any phone, be it mobile, landline or satellite phone, from anywhere in the world, and broadcast audio live over the internet. In addition to this, we have apps for iPhone and Android phones that in addition to supporting the call-in technology, enable the upload of higher quality audio recordings, and meta-data like pictures, descriptions and geolocation. Don’t worry – it doesn’t have to be live – but the important thing is that it can be!
So what happens with the recording has been made. Let’s look at the example of Jordan Romero, the 13 year old kid who broke the record for being the youngest person to climb Everest a few months ago. Him and his team regularly used their satellite phone to call into ipadio whilst climbing everest – like this one.(play clip)So as soon as that was recorded, it appeared on the ipadio website and was automatically posted to Jordan Romero’s wordpress blog.
What’s cool is that every call is then available immediately afterwards as an MP3 in an embeddable player that can be placed on a webpage, a bit like a YouTube video – and can also be integrated with all of the major social media and blogging platforms – so that you can automatically cross-post your calls to Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress and many more platforms.YOUR WEBSITE – grab screengrab of user and bring that in first So what this means is that from one phonecall, you can break news or tell a story wherever you have a presence on the web – and in much greater detail than 140 characters.
Here’s a big list of everything that ipadio can do – we won’t dwell on it but this is all of the stuff that you can do…As you can see, in addition to our basic functionality we also offer things like geotagging recordings, voice to text conversion and iPhone and Android apps.
So why do we think this is relevant to sport? We’ve a lot of experience working with sport and know how many sporting organisations are already using social media – which could give some indications for how it may be used in 2012.Ipadio was actually created for sport. England Hockey, one of our parent company Nemisys’s web development clients, was running “live commentary” on the European Hockey Championships 2007, which consisted of a text updates on a web page. And so we got to wondering why you couldn’t just produce live commentary via any mobile phone, and ipadio was born.Since ipadio was launched, we’ve worked with a number of major sporting organisations, including several National Governing Bodies or NGBs – including as you can see, Paralympics GB, British Handball, England Athletics (who are obviously out in Delhi at the moment), BUCS, the British University and College Sports Organisation, Sport England, British Horseracing and last year’s World Transpant Games. All of them have been using ipadio in a variety of interesting and different ways – some of which I’ll outline later.
So who do we think this tool can be used by? Well, I called the talk “citizen broadcasting” so obviously I think ipadio has a lot of applications for citizen journalists who want to broadcast, and also by the sportspeople themselves. Let’s look at some case studies. As you’ll hear later/have already heard, we’ve been doing a lot of work with John Coster and the Citizen’s Eye newsagency in Leicester. John has been using ipadio for some months now. During the Leicester Sky Ride at the end of August, he transformed Phoenix Square, Leicester into a media centre – and had correspondents all using ipadio on their iPhones to upload their experiences straight to ipadio, and therefore the Citizen’s Eye Twitter feed and the Citizen’s Eye website. [play a demo] There was two ways this could work – Citizens Eye used their reporters who have iPhones, but another tool they could have used are what we call ‘open channels’. Open channels enable calls from any phone, anywhere in the world to broadcast – even if they’re unregistered. That’s exactly what happened in the demo earlier. But crucially what this means is that you can say to people “call this number, enter this pin number, and tell us what’s going on”.So, say in 2012 you wanted to collect opinions on traffic delays and the like, and really wanted a way to get a feel for the scale of the expected disruptions. You could say “if you see disruptions, call this number, enter this pin and tell us” – a quick and easy way of collecting data.I think that as more and more local newspapers close, hyperlocal news outlets such as Citizen’s Eye are increasingly important – ipadio is one of the tools that is making local reporting of news and delivering it to a relevant local audience much easier and crucially, cheaper, than ever before. In fact, Citizen’s Eye have become so good at what they do that the local newspaper in Leicester, the Leicester Mercury, have started relying on them to provide pictures and reports – whereas the Mercury only sends along one journalist, Citizen’s Eye can send an army of volunteers to get the story.
[John] For our second case study, we have England Athletics. Nemisys has been working with England Athletics and UK Athletics for a number of years, they are hidden away somewhere on this slide with tiny writing. And so England Athletics have seen us develop ipadio from the start.
For England Athletics, ipadio is a way to: Give people an insight in to elite athletes commitments to their sport Raise the profile of their 2nd tier athletes Report results from their regional championships Interview people in a fairly informal way We’ve also been working with them on a project to use social media to encourage more people to participate in sport, and so they have been keen to integrate ipadio in to their social media content plan.
Darley Moor is a motorcycle race track in Derbyshire – every few weeks they have a day of racing and have a man in the commentary box commentating on the action. What they’ve used ipadio for is to broadcast this commentary to the world – enabling those who aren’t there to stay tuned into the action. Let’s be honest – what happens on their particular track isn’t going to make the national news, but for dedicated motorcycling fans, this live commentary will be valuable to them. Getting to hear the action unfold live is much more exciting than a few paragraphs in a report a few days later, after all.
So why do we think ipadio and other citizen broadcasting tools could be exciting during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games?There are going to be 8 million people visiting the games as spectators, and many thousands of competitors – every single one of them will have a mobile phone.Outside of London, of course, there’s everyone else in the country – all with tools that will enable them to capture and broadcast events inspired by the Olympics and its legacy.Localism: John CosterMedia legacy? Much more established niche broadcasting and journalism – confident 2012 will be a tipping point where citizen journalism takes off in a big way, rather than just in a few communities One last example. During the Vancouver games, Dave Olson, or Uncle Weed as he called himself broadcast updates using ipadio during the 2010 Vancouver Winter games. Through his podcast, which was listed on iTunes, he provided a unique insight into the games, and crucially, the wider impact of the games upon Vancouver. We expect to see many thousands of people like him at the London games.[John adds:]I also feel that London 2012 might be a tipping point in citizen journalism within the UK. I think citizen journalism was touted as I was graduating in the late 80s, and except where people like John Coster 'make' it happen, I think it's fair to say it's been a slower uptake than most experts predicted. The key to any lasting change will be that those citizen journalists who are prompted to start during the Olympics will continue afterwards. That's something we‘re looking at with some of our NGB clients, working out how we can create a set of niche 'radio stations' for each sport, but with the support of the NGB.