Trusted Reviews is supported by its audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

BBC creating personalised radio service

The BBC has announced that it is developing its own personalised radio service.

It’s estimated that roughly 90 percent of the UK listens to some form of radio each week, and the vast majority of that is live content. However, the trend for downloading and listening to missed content is growing.

The BBC caters for such catcher-uppers already with its vast iPlayer service, but it wants to make the process of discovering this content even easier.

That’s where the idea for a personalised radio station comes from. The aim, according to the blog post on the matter, is for “sophisticated simplicity” – something that’s as easy as turning on the radio at present, but with content curated to your specific tastes.

The service will respond to your needs wherever you are, mixing live content and music playlists with news, weather, and sports alerts. To do this, the service will take into account your tastes as well as such factors as time, location and the device you’re listening on.

BBC radio

Related: 12 hours of listening to Beats 1

An illustration is used of listening to this personalised radio station in the car. Rather than being distracted by flicking between stations when something you don’t like comes on, the new service will give you a constantly agreeable stream of live radio, clips, music recommendations, and news and travel updates. If you still don’t like what’s on, you could just press the left button on the steering wheel and your personal station will flip to the next best option.

That’s about it for specific details at present. “We plan to take some early steps towards this over the next year but the full service will take time to develop,” says the BBC.

Next, take a look at our smartphone buyers guide:

Why trust our journalism?

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

author icon

Editorial independence

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

author icon

Professional conduct

We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.

Trusted Reviews Logo

Sign up to our newsletter

Get the best of Trusted Reviews delivered right to your inbox.

This is a test error message with some extra words