How a road trip created one of the most successful podcast stations in France

When a national cultural channel reinvents itself for digital Sandrine Treiner, Head, Radio France Culture, France

When a national cultural channel reinvents itself for digital Sandrine Treiner, Head, Radio France Culture, France

Sandrine presented this session as the process of how podcasts are changing France Culture for the better.  France Culture is a public National channel, one of 7 of Radio France with 1.8m listers a day - which doubled in 7 years which makes it the second most podcasted radio channel in France.

Began with a road trip in the US in 2015 and realised there were a lot of podcasters in America, podcasting knowledge, ideas and creation.  Already one of the main podcasting channels, but this was more about replays.  Then they understood that there was a different use for podcasts and an opportunity for people to listen anytime and any place. 

She was convinced that new audiences would come via podcasting and not by the main broadcast group and so decided to create 2 podcasts.  One was about epidemics and also La Filière, and adaptation of a BBC story.  Both of these are fully fledged podcasts - narratives and cliffhanger were purely made of on demand listening.

Petits Nicolas is a well known character in France and a theatre show was made and was also made into a podcast which had more than 1m downloads on the first month.

Sandrine said all podcasts needed to be broadcast in a certain time and to get new listeners to radio it needed to be inspired by podcasts which was a key point, making future radio sound like a podcast.

The podcasts they have made come from a legacy of documentaries, but many of these are now on demand podcasts and modified for broadcast.

"We have changed the way we are thinking about Podcasting, not about stream or flow but as a catalogue of on demand programmes and then we broadcast"

Sandrine ended by saying there are not that many differences, they have reversed the chronology of radio and how they are attracting audiences who are becoming younger.  There is now 1 hour each Saturday where podcasts are broadcast on radio as a programme. And the circle is complete...