Billy Bragg pic by Anthony Griffin

Andrew Scott, David Tennant and June Whitfield at the 2012 Awards

All Time Low at Reading 2012

The Radio 2 beta homepage

The 1963 production of Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton with Producer Douglas Cleverdon

The BBC will be 90 years old this November and that feels like a good moment to be celebrating one of the longest-lived programming genres with the first ever BBC Audio Drama Awards.

In the UK, drama has been on-air since the earliest days of BBC radio (from February 1923), initially with extracts from plays by Shakespeare, then plays for children and the first original play written specially for this new medium was Danger by Richard Hughes in 1924. Set in a coalmine after a cave-in, the characters had to communicate in the dark without sight of each other, a situation, it was felt, that reflected the particularity of this new medium - the dark, that is, not the disaster.

The presence of drama programming quickly caught listeners' attention and comments: as early as the late 1920s came letters complaining that the sound effects or the background music were too loud - and that is still the case 80 years on!

By the time World War II broke out, drama and comedy were felt to be such necessary contributions to British morale that a group of actors was contracted to 'play as cast' and evacuated for a short time, with other BBC staff, to Evesham in the first months of the war.

This repertory company soon returned to London and became established as the Radio Drama Company (RDC), remaining a constant part of BBC audio drama productions ever since. Hundreds of actors have passed though its ranks including Julian Rhind-Tutt, Emma Fielding, Alex Jennings, as well as Bertie Carvel and Nina Wadia, two of the award-givers at the ceremony on Sunday.

The RDC company members have also been complemented by many, many freelance actors and most showbiz names from the past 80 years have graced the microphones including, just in the last year, Kenneth Branagh, David Warner, Dawn French, Greta Scacchi, Juliet Stevenson, Jeremy Irons, Janet Suzman, Ian McKellen and, of course, David Tennant - to name but a few.

The other pillar of the history of audio drama is, of course, the writers.

Vital in launching many careers and nurturing and developing new writers all the time, it's worth mentioning a few names from the honours boards such as Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood is probably the world's most famous radio play), Tom Stoppard, Anthony Minghella, Bryony Lavery, Sue Townsend, Lee Hall, Harold Pinter, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Hampton, Kwame Kwei-Armah and David Hare.

More recently, Lenny Henry has had his first play commissioned by and broadcast on Radio 4 and Mike Bartlett, now a prolific stage writer, cut several teeth in radio. He's written a blog on these awards, too, on the Society of Authors site.

No survey of the history of audio drama would be complete without a mention of the longest-lasting soap opera in the world, The Archers. Beginning in 1951 as 'an everyday story of country folk' with the aim of delivering agricultural advice and tips to Britain's farmers, it remains firmly at the centre of many listeners' hearts and is heard by 5 million people every week.

Of course, audio drama is not the sole preserve of the BBC. Internationally, there is still a significant presence of the medium on European and other Anglophone public broadcasting organisations, as well as some commercial production (largely non-broadcast these days).

And it's particularly interesting to see, over the last few years, a burgeoning online presence for the form. Often, but not always, short-form, it's fantastic that the power of storytelling through dialogue and sound alone is continuing to fascinate new makers as well as listeners.

So these Audio Drama Awards (hosted and organised by the BBC but not exclusive to BBC broadcasts) are designed to celebrate the talent, effort and achievement of all those individuals who contribute to this very particular and specialised form.

It's been heartening, as we have pulled the event together, how many people on hearing about the plans have responded that it's about time too. For such a prolific genre with such significantly-sized audiences it gets surprisingly little attention and we thought it was time to shout about it.

Alison Hindell is Head of Audio Drama

• Blog post: The winners of the first BBC Audio Drama Awards
• Radio producer Justine Potter (who was shortlisted for A Shoebox Of Snow by Julie Mayhew) recorded David Tennant's introduction to the Awards. You can hear it on Audioboo.
• Picture: David Tennant and Richard Wilson on stage at the Awards
• BBC News: David Tennant wins BBC audio drama award for Kafka role

Following the headlines in March's iPlayer stats pack that we published last month, I wanted to share some more details and insights about BBC Network Radio's interactive performance, as it was a record month for us. They say events drive reach, and plenty happened on the Radio websites in March that helps prove the adage. Reach to all BBC Radio sites hit 3.7 million average weekly unique browsers*. And if you factor in A&M's music and events websites, such as Music and Radio 1's Big Weekend, we recorded an overall reach for all BBC Audio and Music sites of 4.3 million UK average weekly unique browsers. That's an all-time high for us.

Online interest in Chris Moyles' marathon 52-hour broadcast for Comic Relief was a big part of this, pushing traffic to the Radio 1 site to a record 2.4m average weekly UK unique browsers. Live footage from the studio, carried on the Red Button, attracted 2.84 million viewers. And then there was Fearne Cotton. Her offer to appear in a swimsuit if the total raised by Moyles topped £2 million caused a surge of traffic that helped crash the Radio 1 site for a brief time. So, events do drive reach, and we've learnt some useful lessons there about capacity planning. On top of this, there have been about half a million clicks to view the section of the programme again via the website, and at Radio 1's official channel on YouTube.

We've had a superb month for live online listening. And although live listening via the internet still accounts for a relatively small amount of all digital consumption, we know people find it convenient to stream radio at their desks: compared to consumption via analogue platforms, online radio listening doesn't fall away so dramatically after radio's 'usual' breakfast time peak. In March, we recorded 29 million requests for live streams, 18% up on this time last year. Record performances across BBC network radio contributed to this, including 5 live sports extra, which nabbed 1.3m live stream requests for its World Cup Cricket coverage. Did I say... events drive reach?

We broke more records with our podcasts, delivering 12.3m successful downloads to UK subscribers in March. The Archers topped the list of our daily podcasts, with Scott Mills in second place. Interestingly, although Radio 4's landmark series A History of the World in 100 Objects ended last autumn, its podcasts remain popular enough to make it the 5th most popular daily podcast title in March. This is evidence of the demand there is for making podcasts available for longer and of the public value we can create by opening up the archive. First indications from the Desert Island Discs archive are also very encouraging. I've just had a first sight of April's podcast results - they're looking equally promising, including several hundred thousand successful downloads of our Royal Wedding 2011 podcast. This included a lot of interest from users in English-speaking countries around the world such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. It's another good example of how events drive reach.

A final, encouraging thing to note is the steady growth in reach to A&M's websites optimised for mobile devices. We've done a lot of work over the past 2 years to improve the usability of those sites, including automatically tweaking the pages to suit the device in question, and adding the ability to stream live radio for many devices. Devices are becoming easier to use too, and the performance since the start of this year suggests that the effort is now paying off: significant numbers of users now accessing A&M's content via mobile. March was a great month for this. There was growth across the board, with new sites for Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and Radio 1's Big Weekend contributing to the increase. And there was especially strong growth for Radio 1 and 1Xtra, where all mobile devices are now covered with key services and where fans used their phones to join in the fun with Moyles & Co for Red Nose Day.  Which all goes to show... well, you know what goes here.

* Unique Browsers: this is the term we use to describe a single computer accessing our websites. It's not the same as measuring 'people', and it's not a perfect proxy - but is the closest we have for now. One 'unique browser' is counted for every distinct 'cookie' which has visited a website within a given timeframe. In the BBC, this timeframe is one week. A cookie is a small piece of information that a server sends to your computer to identify that computer on its return. Whenever you clear your cookies, as some people regularly do, your computer is issued with a new cookie when you return to a website.

Alan Phillips is senior business manager, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

Simon Tuff, a senior engineer at the BBC, takes up the technological challenges being met in producing surround sound for online audio.

Alan Ogilvie (in the first surround sound blog post) talked about some of the challenges we face when delivering surround sound online as well as some of the changes that make this increasingly feasible. In this second part I'll look at what broadcasters like the BBC are doing to create surround sound content for you to enjoy as well as some of the challenges this has created!

The BBC has, in fact, been experimenting with multi-channel sound since at least the days of four-channel quadrophonic in the 1970s (and possibly earlier... but I haven't found the records yet). One of the reasons these experiments didn't flourish was the lack of a good method for broadcasting more than two channels of audio (i.e. stereo) to the home in a way that a significant number of our audience could listen to it. So although tests were conducted and some of the results were impressive, nobody had quite worked out why you should need more than two loud speakers for most programmes or how to get it to the home. Without attempting to blog a history of surround sound, it's worth noting that what helped to answer these questions for the broadcasters was the experience of surround sound in cinema which became wide spread in the 1990s and by the 21st century this combined with DVD technology (in home cinemas) was beginning to have a significant influence on television as the audio accompaniment to HDTV.

At the programme making end of the process we had film production as a starting point and at home we had DVD-type home cinema systems with Dolby or DTS 5.1 surround sound. Then in the middle of the signal chain companies, like Dolby, provided 2 main innovations to help us. Firstly they enabled us to move 6 or even 8 channels of audio over infrastructures that had been built for stereo (mostly the wires within our buildings and studios) and secondly they allowed us to deliver surround sound to these home cinema systems, via digital broadcasting, providing an alternative to DVD as the source of both high quality pictures and sound.

The subject of surround sound distribution is another complicated topic worthy of its own blog post, but first: why and how surround sound? Why is it worth the effort and how does broadcasting differ from film?

Answering these questions has also been a journey of learning and innovation, which we haven't finished by any means but by adapting some ideas from the film and recording industries, plus plenty of homegrown innovation, we have developed reasonably cost-effective techniques that work for HDTV and, we hope, radio too.

We know from research on human perception that hearing is very much a three dimensional experience and that this is especially true for the sound we detect from behind. Anthropologists suggest that this rearward hearing sensitivity was developed to help protect us from threats we couldn't see (e.g. attacks from behind) and thus it is one area of the senses that surround sound can use to enhance the media experience by adding the two rear speakers of the 6 speakers required for 5.1 surround sound. With these we can provide a better sense of space with background noise and reflections of the sound sources in front, coming from the rear, but also by proving a sense of motion as objects leave what we can see on screen and pass to either side or move across behind us.

Next, the addition of a centre speaker to the stereo pair (one left, one right). One of the differences between cinema surround and that for TV is the way we place people speaking (or dialogue) in the in the middle of the sound stage in front of the viewer. With a very large screen and a much larger audience, placing all the dialogue in a centre speaker (often hidden behind that screen) works well for movies in the cinema. However, we have found that for home viewing on smaller screens, with people sat closer, the effect is more realistic if we spread the sound (to some extent) across the front 3 speakers but having this centre speaker still gives TV viewers clearer dialogue and better, more stable, sound images for more of those sat on the sofa.

Another aspect of our audio world that surround sound technology aims to better reproduce is the dynamic range of real life i.e. the difference between the quietest and loudest sounds. This can be very dramatic in cinemas, although broadcasters have had to tame this technology to some extent for TV viewing (if we aren't going to annoy the neighbours etc.). We have several tools to help here but perhaps the most well know is the LFE channel (Low Frequency Effects). This is the 0.1 of 5.1. The idea is that the rumbles and bangs that make movies so exciting can be created best by a loudspeaker specifically designed for this purpose. This is partly because the main components of these sounds are at low frequencies as well as great level (or loudness). In this case the low frequencies are typically below 100Hz where humans and at this frequency can't work out which direction they come from... so, if done properly, you only need one speaker and this doesn't damage the sound image. It is this sort of effect that shakes your chest and perhaps the furniture.

Having a technology that can deliver 'Hollywood levels of excitement' is a good place to start and a lot of good surround sound comes with great films - but television and radio programmes cover a broader range and provide a more intimate experience. This is true of other types of drama certainly but the ability to create a sense of space, of really being there, allows other programme types to benefit. Sport is transformed by the sound of the crowd and the atmosphere of a stadium. Sky's premier league football and the BBC's coverage of Wimbledon are both transformed by the roar of the crowd all around you when a goal is scored or the hushed murmurer of expectation on centre court awaiting a match wining serve. Live music is also greatly enhanced by what surround sound brings. Not only can the acoustics of great performance spaces, from concert venues to cathedrals, be better captured but the thrill of being in a festival audience or standing next to the stage can also be magicked up.

The BBC is still learning how to make the best of 5.1 for TV as well as doing experiments to explore ways of bringing surround sound to radio audiences and considering what the next generation of audio technology, perhaps to accompany 3D pictures, might be!

Simon Tuff is Principle Technologist at BBC FM&T

• Details of some surround sound tests that BBC R&D are doing and an article from The Independent on BBC surround sound experiments.
• Michael Gerzon was one of the innovators behind surround sound.
• Two EBU documents (PDFs): one about MPEG surround (which the BBC hopes to look at as a possible technology) and one about multichannel audio for television.
• Picture by DIS-PATCH Festival. Some rights reserved.

Editor's note: surround sound has history - it was first used in 1940 by Walt Disney - and in this two-part post, Alan Ogilvie reminds us that the BBC's first try at surround sound for streaming audio was back in 2002. He also hints at some plans for the future - SB.

In the first part of this blog post, I want to take you back to when Radio experimented with surround sound on the internet - namely being able to listen to a surround sound-mixed production of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood (2002), and the later 'phases' of Hitchhiker's Guide (2005). It was great! "Why haven't we been doing more?", I hear you ask. Well - there is a simple answer, and you probably won't like it. The internet and the surround sound devices we needed back then just weren't widespread enough. Sure - I was able to listen to the streams we provided, but then I had all the kit necessary to handle it on my home computer... you'd expect that, what with me being the manager responsible for the infrastructure behind the encoding and streaming of the National Radio networks online. But it just wasn't really 'mainstream'.

In those years, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that your computer had the right equipment to decode surround sound audio (specifically 5.1 channel surround sound). Your computer was most likely, compared to what we have nowadays, just a bit 'clunky'. Look at the advances in the 'online' world in the last 8 years since Under Milk Wood was first made available online (and sorry - but it's not currently available to listen to again). Even your internet connection wasn't entirely 'up to it' either, this was before the internet needed to expand to support the masses using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or iPlayer. Do you remember those days when you'd be lucky if you had broadband and it gave you 512kbps down, the majority of people online at home were only just getting over having a modem that was just slightly faster than a fax machine.

To make sure you could listen to our Radio streams, we had to go for bitrates much lower than we have today in order to keep people happy. In order to deliver the special surround sound streams to you meant that you'd need a bigger bandwidth than what was needed just to listen to regular Radio 4 output online - by only providing Under Milk Wood and Hitchhikers as on-demand streams this meant that your computer could buffer-ahead enough of this 'massive' stream for you to be able to listen to it without constant interruptions from re-buffering. Ah, how I remember waiting on my Windows Media Player on my home computer to buffer the needed amount to listen - and I lived in London with what was considered to be a good internet connection at that time. Suffice to say it didn't take off on the web... not then, anyway.

Nowadays we have better internet connections, and the devices we can connect are both more capable and more appropriate. When I say that they are 'more appropriate' I mean that when I listened in 2002, most home computers were shut away in rooms that were occasionally used by the family... now these devices are becoming part of the fabric of your home life. Just think about where your Games Console is - it's possibly in your front room, connected to a flat screen TV and you probably have a Home Cinema set-up for surround sound. Or maybe you like your audio - and have a nice surround sound capable HiFi system with the ability to stream Internet Radio services. Maybe your home computer, which now tend to come with a soundcard that supports surround sound and enough , is connected to decent speakers (because you use it to play Bluray or DVDs).

We are producing surround sound content to some extent - my colleague Simon will elaborate in part 2 about some of the challenges faced in producing the source material. So maybe we should try this again. Maybe we should take some of this wonderful surround sound audio that's being produced for Radio, and make it available online?

What would we, the BBC, need to do to make that happen? Well, luckily, we've already begun looking at Radio productions and our streaming infrastructure. There are a couple of key areas we need to clear to make this work. In order to stream surround sound online to your computer, for example, we need to get the 'end-to-end' delivery sorted. By this I mean that the surround sound mixed input from production must connect to our stream encoders, these encoders must use the correct codec and bitrate, then it has to be wrapped in the correct transport to stream it to a player on your computer which can not only decode the stream itself but can correctly play it back on your sound device. No mean feat. Especially when, if you take a look around the web, many of the 'common' services for Internet Radio, and even the video services, don't offer surround sound.

Oh, and on top of this, we'd like to do it 'live'... not just for on-demand.

Alan Ogilvie is Platform Manager at BBC Audio & Music Interactive

• Picture by Jens Lumm. Some rights reserved.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/showcase

A few weeks ago we released our first version of the BBC Music Showcase and this week we have made some important tweaks to the site following user testing. We've had some comments following posts from my colleagues Andy Puleston and Matt Coulson, so I thought I'd write to tell you a bit more.

So what is Music Showcase and why is it important? What we've released so far is an aggregation of all the BBC music content that is not a full-length programme. Our radio station sites and iPlayer cover that angle fairly well, but what we haven't cracked until now is getting those nuggets of great content out of their full-length programmes to expose them in new ways. That content could be a live music session, or an interview with an artist, or a feature about a single artist, a DJ mix or a live concert. The BBC creates this kind of content in droves but it's almost impossible to find what you are really interested in unless you know exactly what was broadcast and at what time. Most web users don't have the patience for the time-consuming searching that this involves.

Now we can start to pull all those special moments out of their full-length programmes and offer them via genre, 'curated collections' or artist search - or via filters like 'most popular', 'latest in', and 'about to expire'. In other words, these unique pieces of content are now accessible and can be put together in collections which make sense to users. So, for example, we have a collection of great music clips taken from live music sessions right across the BBC, another of classic interviews, and the Best of the Festivals 2010.

Music Showcase is just the start. The next stage is 'curated collections': we want to tap into the world-class talent that the BBC employs to generate human-powered recommendations. Our music radio networks filter, curate and recommend music every single hour of every day. Filtering the vast amount of music available is at the heart of what our stations do: from a radio station playlist (like Radio 1's and Radio 2's), through to specialist music experts such as Gilles Peterson, Jez Nelson or Bob Harris. So far, we haven't capitalised on this online. The opportunity opening up to us now is to allow these musical experts to have a real voice on bbc.co.uk.

This development requires a fairly significant cultural change at the BBC, a move to understanding the value of elements of whole programmes, not just the programmes themselves. To go from understanding this to actually clipping music content from programmes will require changes to the way we work and some new tools. These things will take time, but the feedback so far suggests there's a real appetite for it.

This is good news for broadcast radio. We're doing something which takes the fantastic content we make every day in our broadcast output and offers it in an appropriate manner for our digital audiences. This is truly a mashup of traditional broadcast media with digital media. I believe that it's projects like this that will help traditional media brands move successfully into the fully digital world.

The Music Showcase is just one of the strands of work feeding into our thinking around radio and music online, as discussed on the BBC Internet blog by Erik Huggers, Director of BBC Future Media & Technology. One thing is for certain: music aggregation and music recommendations from BBC talent will continue to be an important part of what we offer in the future.

Have a play with the Showcase and leave a comment here to let me know what you think. Remember it's still in alpha mode so expect to see lots of small updates over the coming weeks and months.

Chris Kimber is Managing Editor, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

• The picture shows the Rolling Stones in concert. They're included in the Music Showcase collection Rock 'n' Roll DNA.