What is Radio Pop?
Radio Pop enhances your BBC radio listening. Enabling you to create a personal record of the programmes you like and see what your friends and everyone else is listening to. The radio service of tomorrow, today!
- Listen to BBC radio and we’ll track which programmes you listen to. But you’ve got to use our Radio Pop player (log in first) or one of our widgets. Otherwise we won’t know what you’re listening to.
- When you really like something you hear or you just want to remember it, hit the button.
- Check out the lists, graphs and stats about your listening (here’s someone else’s graphs to give you a taste).
- Invite your friends – then you can check what they’re listening to.
A Prototype
Radio Pop is a an experimental prototype brought to you by BBC Radio Labs. We don’t know how long it will remain here and we make no guarantees as to its reliability or performance. We’re doing this to learn things and we will do our best to make it better and welcome your feedback.
We store all your listening data and we make it, and your username, visible to everyone else. This means that anyone can see what and when you have been listening with Radio Pop (although you have the ability to add or remove programmes on your profile if you wish). No other data that you have provided will be displayed. We hope that’s OK. We may change this in a future version, so that you can hide your listening data or just let your friends see it, but in the meantime everyone can see it and we think that makes the service more powerful – for you and for everyone else. We also make your data available through an API. This means that you or other people can build other services, websites or applications that display this data in interesting ways.
Listening to the radio
Listen to the radio through the Radio Pop player (log in first) and we’ll track your listening. Obviously, this should really all be integrated into the iPlayer. But we hope that Radio Pop will help us learn about a service like this and that someday, something like it will appear in iPlayer.
At the moment we only support live listening, but we plan to include Listen Again at some point. We have, however, added a sneaky feature to add programmes that you heard but weren’t using Radio Pop at the time. Just go over to your listening page. and click the “Add your listening” link.
To listen to BBC radio through Radio Pop you must have RealPlayer correctly installed. Find out more in this guide (though note that we are not currently supporting Windows Media Player).
What’s next?
Keep an eye on the Radio Labs blog for news about Radio Pop and its future development. You can send us feedback or suggestions by emailing us or visiting Radio Pop on GetSatisfaction.