I am delighted to be able to announce that, like our colleagues in Television, we can now make Ö÷²¥´óÐã radio programmes available for at least 30 days for catch up listening in Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer Radio.
has  about the background to this announcement and the impact on TV. Until now all our radio shows have been available for at least 7 days. We have the rights to keep some factual programmes such as and indefinitely and this has been very popular.
From now on almost all the programmes that are currently available for only 7 days will be available for 30 days. This is great news because we can make more of our full programmes available for longer, and we will be including the music as it was originally played out.
The majority of radio catch up traffic comes from the fantastic array of Radio 4 and 4 Extra shows. We know audiences enjoy catching up with Drama and Comedy and with this change you will have 4 times as many dramas and comedies to choose from. We also look forward to creating more collections of the newly available content to help people find some of the gems they may have missed.
Downloads
We also have a very successful download service, which are mainly accessed through in non-Ö÷²¥´óÐã sites such as iTunes. These see over 20m downloads in the UK every month for a selected range of programmes and compilations where the Ö÷²¥´óÐã has the download rights. There is an amazing breadth of content covered, including Desert Island Discs, Friday Night Comedy, and the Kermode and Mayo film reviews as well as Ö÷²¥´óÐã News and complilations of stand out comic moments or interviews from our Music Programmes.
These selected programmes and compilation Podcasts are available to the user forever once they have been downloaded so the range of content which we make available in this way is restricted by the rights that we hold. We have to edit the music to keep to our agreements. So on Desert Island Discs the download version have only 30 seconds of each of the popular music tracks.
We are in the middle of building out new underlying technology for making our radio content available online. This will replace some systems that have been around for over a decade and are getting too unreliable and expensive to maintain. This is a major project which we will share more about soon. Once that work is done we look forward to enabling some more ways to enjoy our great radio shows.
Andrew Scott is General Manager of Radio Product, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Future Media