For those that are of the belief that radio is dead… they are incredibly wrong if the BBC‘s faith in the format is anything to go by… you just have to add a little video to it, that’s all.

The British public broadcaster have made a new change to their well-known BBC iPlayer catch-up service, in making the BBC Radio 1 station the first and currently only radio station to be featured amongst their catch-up TV content on the channel list.

While the content will naturally not be as well-produced as their TV counterparts, the audio should at least be top-notch, with viewers able to tap into live and on-demand webcam-based and original special event content made by the radio station, as of yesterday (10 November), and considering that most radio coverage on British-wide stations is already streamed with such a video option, the broadcasters have not considered it too big a stretch to incorporate their biggest station into their on-demand TV platform.

BBC controller Ben Cooper said of the changes made: “What you’ll find on iPlayer will focus on Radio 1 live events, our family of brilliant presenters, and, of course, the lives of our young audience. Underpinning much of this is our dedication to discovering and curating the best new music. Our challenge is to continue to develop a proposition that both brings new young audiences to BBC iPlayer and also acts as another access point for audiences to discover the breadth of incredible content that Radio 1 delivers.”

Content available on launch includes coverage of the Teen Awards, a ‘brand new music chart show’, and recent ‘Live Lounge’ interview and music sessions with celebrities including Adele and modern method-lover Taylor Swift.

Following on from an existing official YouTube channel for BBC Radio 1 listeners to watch and of course the existing on-demand radio platform provided by the BBC, will turning radio into TV online be an unusual breakthrough in the on-demand industry?

The YouView set-top box collective brand is now an established part of the media market within the UK, and competing to grow with new features just like their growing number of competitors. And in an effort to keep up, they have introduced new features from the BBC.

Naturally needing to offer their improvements for the platform considering they are a participating party in the free-to-air smart TV venture, the BBC have put on the newest version of their ‘connected red button services’, alongside an updated edition of the BBC iPlayer, though both of which have arrived comparatively late when compared with other platforms.

Currently limited only to users of BT and Humax-based set-top boxes (with TalkTalk boxes to receive the update “in due course”), YouView customers are now set to be able to access an array of Sport and News apps via their remote’s red button alongside online on-demand streaming coverage of sporting and musical events.

The iPlayer red button updates, meanwhile, see users able to take advantage of a revised 30-day catchup window, exclusive iPlayer programming, and greater content curation abilities than ever before.

The BBC’s release, especially considering the part-funding and that many of the new red button features have been seen on Virgin Media TiVo boxes since ‘late 2012′ (barely months after YouView launched) amongst other smart TV providers since, will be seen as more of a relief than a benefit amongst some users, but now that stage is complete, will the BBC be able to support their own interests and develop on YouView in time with third parties?

The latest in a long line of BBC projects undertaken, the public broadcaster, with the history, funds, and freedom to do a little more than their commercial competitors (rightly or wrongly), have launched the ‘Genome Project‘, which aims to archive every single TV and radio broadcast that has ever been made in the UK under the BBC banner.

Whilst that is a huge ask considering the BBC’s legacy (with even their best known shows being sacrificed or going missing before an improvement in archiving a few decades ago), the venture aims to go from 1923 onwards with support of the online community in the ‘curation and chronicling’ of every BBC broadcast… ever.

Currently on the official website, while without much content-wise, have put up ‘digital editions’ of each issue of the Radio Times magazine that has been published between 1923-2009, meaning that aside from late schedule changes, users can see what was on and when at various points in modern history.

Aiming to have a Wikipedia-style operation in which suggestions and changes can be made by its readers, the BBC have opened up the project to users with ‘Genome’ keeping moderation on the contributions, whilst official audio/video clips are to be added in relevant places over time by the broadcaster and by public users, as they aim to find what was previously lost where possible.

An official blog post on the matter stated:

“Genome – the BBC project to digitise the Radio Times magazines between 1923 and 2009 is now live. On the site you can find BBC broadcast information – ‘listings’ – extracted from those editions. You can also search individual programme titles, contributors and synopsis information.

Our aim on this project is to curate a comprehensive history of every radio and TV programme ever broadcast by the corporation, and make that available to the public. Our first step has been this digitisation of the BBC radio and TV programme schedules from the Radio Times magazine; the next phase of the project is to incorporate what was actually broadcast, as well as the regional and national variations. It’s one of the most important steps we’re taking to begin unlocking the BBC’s archive, as Genome is the closest we currently have to a comprehensive broadcast history of the BBC.

We’re really pleased to get the site live, not least because so many of you have been asking “when”, “how soon” and telling us “how useful it would be”. The challenges in making available the 4.42 million programme records so far have been significant – you can read about some of the recent ones on the Internet blog.

We need your help too though. We’re looking to you to help us to clean up the data. The scanning process – known as ‘Optical Character Recognition’ – has produced plenty of errors: punctuation in the wrong places, spaces where there shouldn’t be any or no spaces where there should, as well as fundamental misunderstandings about who did what.

We’ve made it possible for you to submit an edit to us, as you use the site. We’ll validate your suggested changes and publish the ones which are approved.

We’ve also included a ‘Tell Us More’ form, at the bottom of each programme listing, so we can tap into the collective memory, insight and knowledge of our users, making use of the wealth of experience out there about our programmes, something we’d like to capture.

We also know that the schedule changed considerably on occasion, because of events in the real world and we need that information too.

Additionally, during the process of building Genome, we’ve identified a few ‘chunks’ of data that are missing from the database, but due to the way in which OCR works, didn’t get picked up in the original scans. So, we will be adding this in.

The Radio Times has been published with regional variations since 1926. The magazines we scanned and the data sets which have been included in Genome are not exhaustive, rather they represent the ones which we could access and which covered the greatest areas and variations. In the future, we will look into the implications of attempting provide a more complete set of regional data.

We won’t be able to reflect what you send us straight away, but as we build on BBC’s Genome, it will come in to its own.

Now that we have published the planned broadcast schedule, our next step is to match the records in our archive catalogue (the programmes that we have a copy of in our physical archives) with the Genome programme listings. This helps us identify what proportion of the broadcasts exist in a potentially ‘playable’ form, and highlights the gaps in our archive.

It is highly likely that somewhere out there, in lofts, sheds and basements across the world, many of these ‘missing’ programmes will have been recorded and kept by generations of TV and radio fans. So we’re hoping to use Genome as a way of bringing copies of those lost programmes back in to the BBC archives too.

But, even if we don’t have an actual copy of the programme, we’ll also look to publish related items in our archives, such as scripts, photographs and associated paper-work. We’re looking in to the logistics of making some of these items available via Genome. Clearly, this will in some cases be a long and painstaking task. The BBC’s various archives contain millions of items spread over 23 archive centres across the UK, most of them in analogue form. It’s a big job, one we’re looking forward to reporting back on in the future.

What happens after 2009 when the Genome data “stops”? Well the information held at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes starts in 2007 (the birth of the iPlayer) and as the Genome data is improved and corrected (by you!), we expect to start ‘backfilling’ the bbc.co.uk/programme pages with the Genome data.”

A unique venture that will be unmatched around the world at least in sheer scale, will the BBC’s comprehensive content wiki be seen as another passing fancy by its critics, or will the Genome Project be able to put every piece of the broadcaster’s history (presumably with a 5-year buffer for new items) together  in an intriguing and well-presented manner?

The BBC iPlayer’s long-held presence has been a familiar one to almost all British internet users – hosting almost all of the BBC’s content from the past week and making it available for on-demand streaming.

Except that the ‘week’ part will now be scratched out in favour of ‘month’ as part of new upgrades to the service from the public service broadcaster.

Running through BBC iPlayer and BBC iPlayer Radio, the changes will allow viewers to catch up on BBC programming over a 30 day-period following original air date, as opposed to a previous 7 day-stretch.

The BBC’s director general Tony Hall summarised: “BBC iPlayer pioneered online viewing. It is recognised as not just the first, but the best service of its type in the world. It offers amazing value. But we want to go further. That’s why we began reinventing iPlayer earlier this year with a brand new redesign and features. Extending the catch-up window to 30 days now makes the best value on-demand service even better. We have a fantastic autumn schedule and the public will now have more opportunities to watch the shows they love.”

With the changes set to accommodate upcoming shows including Peaky Blinders and The Fall (TV), and Just a Minute and The Archers (radio), online viewers will see the new feature introduced immediately with any new content put up, although shows already online (including those available for a period larger than seven days) are set to be unaffected, as will the BBC’s podcasting services, which are a separate division that already in some areas aims for long-held content.

A delayed reaction from a planned summer launch, the BBC’s efforts (which co-incided with an announcement of their Top 20 ‘most-requested programmes’ on iPlayer for this year so far through to August, led by a Sherlock episode with over 3.6 million hits) will certainly increase the quality of service on paper, but will they follow through on that potential with the implementation?

The BBC‘s structure of not airing commercials or charging subscription fees has always been one that has been questioned/admired around the world based on how corporately-minded you are, and it is a structure that is not going any time soon, according to the public broadcaster’s director-general.

Tony Hall, writing a guest column for the Daily Mirror, claimed that the Licence Fee approach (of £145.50 annually per household) that enables them to do this is still the relevant way forward, with subscriptions or advertising not only damaging commercial competitors in those fields by becoming a new and established alternative, but also preventing the British public from getting what they want out of a public broadcaster, which is “…great programmes that we can all enjoy”.

He wrote: “In the age of iPlayer, YouTube, Twitter and free services online, some people say the Licence Fee has had its day. I think they are wrong. Look at what you get in return for a fee that works out at 40p a day – Strictly, EastEnders, Doctor Who, Sherlock, the World Cup, Olympics, Match of the Day, CBeebies and CBBC, new dramas like Happy Valley and Line of Duty, the best natural history programmes, all of the BBC’s radio stations, the BBC website and iPlayer, news, sport and weather apps, and impartial news from around the world.”

Claiming that retaining the fee is the only way in which the BBC can retain control of their traditions and continue offering ‘something for everyone’, it was noted that the organization ‘has always moved with the times’ and would be able to be ‘modernised again’ should the need arise, as had been done with stopping radio licence fees and the introduction of colour TV fees. One of those measures is believed to be introducing the fee to viewers who have forgone TV licences in favour of watching all content through streaming, most prominently on the free BBC iPlayer platform.

Hall also points out the BBC’s accessibility as a popular factor, with the statistic that 1-in-25 viewers in America witnessed the final episode of cult series Breaking Bad through subscription cable network AMC last year, as opposed to a 1-in-5 UK audience for the Sherlock season 3 finale on the BBC. He added a further defence of traditional ‘live’ TV viewing, citing that 90% of all British television is still viewed live (compared with an ‘only slowly rising’ 2% for iPlayer-exclusive BBC households), with the audience numbers of 15 million for an Italy v England 2014 FIFA World Cup football match running past midnight a prime example of the BBC providing a means for a nation to “share an experience”.

Hall, in his role of director-general since 2013, has claimed that there is still plenty of life left for the licence fee, and that it is the best way of ensuring the organisation remain for years to come, in order to continue their ever-present goal of managing to “…serve everyone, whatever their background, sex or colour, the BBC needs to ensure its staff and presenters reflect modern Britain. The BBC’s job is to deliver to you. Not to politicians or the powerful. Some 96% of the population watch, listen or use the BBC every week. They choose the BBC 140 million times a day. Those 140 million decisions wouldn’t happen without our commitment to serve everyone.”

They could still do with paying certain members of their on-screen and behind-the-scenes ‘talent’ a little less, though, think how much serving could be done with that money…