Multimedia Analytics Challenges and Opportunities for Creating Interactive Radio Content

The emergence of audio streaming services and evolved listening habits notwithstanding, broadcast radio is still a popular medium that plays an important role in contemporary users' media consumption mix. While radio's strength has traditionally lain in the shared live experience that it enables, radio shows are nowadays much more than just a linear broadcast feed: they are about user engagement and interaction over a amalgam of communication channels. Producing interactive radio programs in a cost-effective way thus requires understanding and indexing a large set of multimedia content, not just audio data (but also e.g., text, user-generated content, web resources). This position paper discusses a number of open challenges and opportunities with respect to the application of multimedia analytics in interactive radio production that need to be addressed in order to facilitate content creation at scale. Our work aims to support the future evolution of (interactive) radio, this way helping the radio medium to stay relevant in an ever-changing media ecosystem.