BBC Radio Explorer

» see bbc.co.uk/radio/explorer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Radio Explorer went live on 29 May 2014 without a press release or any of the apparatus the BBC normally wheels out. What it got instead was a tweet from the Radio 4 account inviting people to try it, and a blog post about how it had been built. Tech Digest noticed anyway and ran a piece under the headline that the BBC had quietly launched something that made radio relevant again.

The idea was small enough to describe in a sentence. You typed in a subject, and it searched across every program title and synopsis the catalog held, down to the short descriptions, for anything the BBC was allowed to play you right then. It filtered that down to what was actually streamable, including clips, and then it played the lot back as a continuous station about your subject. No episode lists and no deciding what you wanted before you got it.

It ran for two and a half years. On 15 December 2016 the BBC turned it off, and the work it had proven went into BBC Sounds instead.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ten percent of the week ~

Radio Explorer came out of BBC Design + Engineering's ten percent time, the arrangement where engineers get a slice of the week for things nobody asked them for. Jason Williams built the first version on the BBC's Forge platform, and the thing that made it possible was Nitro, the metadata API that let BBC products query what programs actually existed and what state they were in.

That is the unglamorous part of the story and it is also the whole story. A search toy over a broadcaster's archive is only as good as the catalog underneath it, and the BBC had just spent years building a catalog that could answer questions. Radio Explorer was built directly on top of that work.

~ what the search actually read ~

At launch it only covered the speech networks, which is a sensible place to start when your index is made of words. Later it opened up to every BBC network. In December 2014 it got its public moment on Radio 5 Live's Radio Review of the year, where somebody typed in "Christmas Puddings" live on air to see what would come back, and Williams was interviewed about it. That was the closest it came to having a launch moment.

~ listening from outside the archive ~

A tool like this assumes you have a seventy-year broadcast archive behind you and a license fee that paid for it. The BBC I could reach from Turkey was a different BBC: the World Service, and BBC Türkçe, which for years was the thing you tuned to when you wanted a second account of what was happening at home. That is a real relationship with the BBC and it is nothing like having its whole radio library indexed and waiting for a search box.

~ what came after ~

BBC Sounds launched in 2018 with recommendations, personalized mixes and a catalog that reaches back decades. The specific trick Radio Explorer did, where a typed subject becomes a station, is not really in there. What survived was the demonstration that the archive could be addressed by topic at all, which is not nothing, and which is the usual fate of a ten percent project: the idea gets promoted and the implementation gets buried.

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