The “Radio at the Edge” conference took place in Millbank, London yesterday. This is an annual conference that looks at new technologies and directions that radio is taking.

It was very well attended, with a variety of interesting guests.

First up was our own Clive Dickens, presenting “From V to A”, the story of this station’s change to Absolute Radio. Rather than summarise it, take a look at yourself here:

Next up was perhaps the day’s most important panel discussion entitled “DAB - Dead and Buried?” This was led by The Sunday Times’ James Ashton with a panel that included Peter Davies (Ofcom), Mark Friend (BBC), Tony Moretta (DRDB), Darryl Pomicter (Radeo.net), and Paul Fairburn (102.2 Smooth Radio, London).

Tony Moretta was a “defender” of DAB - one in three households have a device, with 14m people listening a week. And these people listen to more services. He also said that the internet isn’t the future of radio; it’ll be part of the ecology, but DAB will be the mainstay. The iPlayer’s great, but it won’t work in the car, walking around or even in the kitchen.

Paul Fairburn of Smooth said that GMG weren’t “rabid enthusiasts.” They’d see how it went, although they saw the costs as very high. But they’d be stupid to drop DAB. 8.5% of his listening comes from DAB.

Mark Friend of the BBC talked about the costs of simulcasting in so many formats, and the infrastructure costs if we were to listen to all our radio via the internet. But he wasn’t sure exactly what a “Freeview moment” might be, referring to calls for digital radio to “do a Freeview” and reinvent itself.

Ofcom’s Peter Davies also addressed this by noting that there were only 600,000 DTT receivers in existance when Freeview launched. There are 8m DAB digital radios out there.

In other parts of the discussion, people talked about possible changes to the local/regional/national set-up of DAB radio. “Machinations” we were told, were taking place [the Digital Radio Working Group is due to report soon].

Kelly Shepherd from the BBC World Service showed us what it was doing to engage its audience in the 21st century. They had started with a redesign of their website, informed by their own listeners. They now offered a broad range of podcasts in a variety of languages, as well as putting a greater emphasis on video. Different sites offered different levels of detail, but mobile is very important to the World Service, and they are ensuring that all their sites are mobile compatible. Finally she highlighted the Bangladesh River Journey site that had used a variety of technologies to illustrate the trip.

Fi Glover, presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live led the next session, entitled Getting Intimate with the Audience. This panel featured Absolute Radio’s own Iain Lee who talked about how he used new technologies to communicate with his audience. He talked about his own podcast - Shindiggery. The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones is keen blogger and sends many a Twitter message, so much so, that he was trying to send messages from the stage (here’s a photo he took of Iain Lee). Also on the stage was Channel 4’s Daniel Heaf.

We heard how each of the panel used the various technologies, and the pros and cons of communicating with sometimes a quite small audience.

After lunch, the next session was called Death by a Thousand Cuts: More Choice = More Noise. Speakers from Sony Records, last.fm the BBC and We7 (who’s new offering, we were told, would launch today), spoke about how their various business planned on making money and operating in the future. Frederico Bolza was quite refreshing as a representative of a major record label, with a willingnes to try new models. He pointed out however, that they still earnt 90% of their revenue from sales of recorded music, with the other 10% coming from broadcasters.

There was discussion about how we filter music, with radio stations effectively acting as filters. John Peel used to be a “filter”. There were also discussions about how to add extra value to what’s being played - linking to sites where songs can be purchased and providing additional information about the artists. This isn’t always easy with 57% of music played on Radio 3 being “non-standard” (in other words - making those links isn’t automatic). The BBC talked a little about what it might be doing in the future with personalisation which was something that they felt they needed to be doing now as everyone expected it.

John Ousby from the BBC (and once of these parts), and Robin Pembrooke from Global, then ran us through a session on visualising radio. John talked about some of the things the BBC had already done from Scott Mills’ recent “Live from his Flat” event, to a clever piece of technology the BBC employed to send to people who weren’t lucky earlier this year when it gave away tickets to the Radio 1 Big Weekend - Band In Your Hand (It’s very clever, and if you have a PC and a webcam, you should give it a go). He also demoed some mock-ups of different forms of visualisation of radio that could be available on other platforms like Freeview or cable. The key word was “glanceability”.

Robin Pembrooke took as through some commercial radio visualisations, noting that it didn’t have the manpower that the BBC had to do things as big and clever as the BBC. He thought that some new DAB devices still needed to go through a couple more iterations before they were really easy to use, although the new Pure Evoke Flow was praised as being a step in the right direction.

But what he really wanted to do was show off a new iPhone application that Global will be releasing for many of their FM stations in the next week or so. Although it’s not available just yet, the demo looked very good, with information about now playing artists appearing on the phone, alongside local weather information and even traffic camera pictures. For advertisers, it offers the opportunity for listeners to find out more about their products, and most importantly, all of this is “taggable” so that you can come back later and find out about the song you liked, or the product you wanted to learn more about.

Finally, we had two sessions about podcasting. First up was Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT who came to us live (and ambitiously) via Skype from California. This Week in Tech, or TWiT, is a very popular technology podcast that Leo started several years ago. This has now burgeoned into a network of different podcasts and video streams. He talked to us about numbers, how he was getting it to pay for itself, and difficulties he faced. For example, advertising is all done along national lines, so although all the brands has had as advertisers are international, the buyers are targeting US subjects. As a result, he’s not currently able to monetise a third of his streams.

The numbers sounded quite strong, but he knows that he’s essentially an independent in an area that is slowly being filled up with large media groups. And he emphasised his need to do deals for bandwidth since he’s currently serving 4-5TB a day. The specialised nature of the audience does mean that he’s able to obtain some quite high rates for advertising however.

The day ended with a live-on-tape (well Mac) podcast from Collings and Herring. Andrew Collins and Richard Herring are both writers and broadcasters, each of whom maintains their own blog (their most recent entries talk about their visit to the conference). Their “presentation” was a live recording of their podcast, largely about how it was that they came to make a podcast.

Rather than say too much more about it, I suggest that you download and listen to it yourself. [Warnng: It's not for those of a more delicate sensibility - let's just say, we couldn't broadcast it in its current form!]

The recording done, we stayed for a few drinks courtesy of Media UK before heading to a nearby pub.