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Steve, thank you for the discussion. I’m particularly interested in your mention that the commands for the radioinfo flash briefing don’t work for some listeners and that you ‘are now in the process of refining [your] radioinfo flash briefing for all the platforms’. That suggests you have control over determining which commands will work, and that it’s not all in the hands of Alexa and Google.
Since the early days of Google Home, I’ve been in touch several times with the ABC Classic help desk about the issue that asking Google for ‘ABC Classic’ or ‘ABC Classic FM’ always plays ABC Classic 2, not the main station. The ABC help desk was concerned but in the end insisted that it was a ’third party’ issue that they have no control over, with the implication that I needed to find a human at Google who was willing to work it out.
The day will come - perhaps quite soon - when the survival of radio stations depends upon listeners being able to easily find them on smart speakers.
EDITOR COMMENT: Alexa does allow creation of flash briefings, which is what Steve is working on. Google... still struggling! See here for more on Alexa https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/understand-the-flash-briefing-skill-api.html
"I still like the old radio theme more than the tv theme"
I'm also a fan of horse-drawn carriages, fountain pens and AM radio receivers. However, like all of the above, the Majestic Fanfare has no hope of appealing to anyone younger than 50.
The Majestic Fanfare is fine for ABC Radio National, and in my view, should stay there, given its historical significance. For every other ABC service, mix-outs and treatments of the music used on the television should be the plan, for a coherent ABC News sonic brand. As an immigrant, the first time I heard the Majestic Fanfare, my mouth was agape.
It's basic sonic branding to have the same music on all services; astonishingly, ABC News Radio has a random, over-the-top, super-busy piece of orchestral music, which you'll hear nowhere else. As spoof news music, it's worse than the pastiche from The Day Today, a wonderful mickey-take from the UK ten years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGE9153VFE
A coherent news brand is something that even the BBC is incapable of (witness the differences between the BBC World Service's branding, carried here in its entirety on SBS Radio 3, and BBC World News (here on Fetch, Foxtel and SBS in the mornings). But in an age where all media is under attack, it should be really obvious when you're listening to ABC News. Right now, the ABC has at least three different music themes, and take it from my fresh ears: the two on radio are simply not fit for purpose any more.
PS: Thanks for listening to Podnews. I have fun doing that.