The UK state broadcaster BBC wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said. The planned service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, was revealed by Mark Thompson at the Radio Festival in Cambridge, England.

It aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player. It will be part of the BBC’s iPlayer, a free service which will also offer seven days of BBC TV on demand. Thompson said MyBBCRadio would use peer-to-peer technology to provide “thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves”. The BBC hoped to share these ideas with the commercial sector, he added.

In March, the corporation said people had listened to 20 million hours of BBC content online, using everything from live streams to downloaded programmes, and in May, audiences downloaded 4.5 million BBC podcasts.

In his speech, Mr Thompson said the corporations’ governors would decide on whether podcasting would become a permanent service later this year.

The decision will be based, in part, on a study of how the BBC’s podcasts affect the commercial sector. The BBC is fully financed by the UK government, but there are also many commercial television and radio services in the UK.

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