There was an uproar from listeners in the UK last week as the BBC dropped the radio stream from its excellent iPlayer app, which like our ABC’s equivalent, allows listeners/viewers to time shift programs via the internet. But management was quick to clear up the misunderstanding, assuring its audience that they weren’t dropping Radio, but rather unbundling it from an environment where it doesn’t belong – i.e. alongside television.

Daniel Danker, who runs the BBC’s ‘Programs and On Demand’ department says that the corporation believes that radio and television listeners want different things. Usage shows that 70 percent of requests for radio content are for live streams, as opposed to just 10 percent for television. So building different products is the best way to serve listeners because most radio listening doesn’t come through iPlayer, it comes through the websites of the relevant radio stations.

This data utterly confirms what Radio operators have known for years, that one of Radio’s unique strengths is it’s immediacy. Most of the time what you hear on Radio is happening now.

Big deal, you say, “we know that.” Yes, we do. But as an industry, how well have we been selling it? Sure, it bobs up on every list of Radio’s benefits alongside such things as “localism” and “low production costs”, but it carries about as much weight as “colour coded bumpers” on a new cars’ features list. The true benefit of ‘immediacy’ seems nebulous.

Often immediacy is sold as Radio being first with the news or a community link in times of emergency. All good and praiseworthy, but hardly the glue that keeps the listener attached to their favourite station.

If you were charged with selling Radio as a medium, what priority would you put on “live delivery?” Is it more important than localism or, say, “intimacy” with the listener? Or is it pretty much intertwined? It’s hard to feel that an announcer is talking directly to you if you know that the program is pre-recorded.

In a time when other commercial media is struggling to maintain a personal relationship with its consumers Radio still holds sway. Are we selling ourselves hard enough or are such things so intuitive in nature that if the audience doesn’t feel it, you can’t sell it to them?