Absolute Radio’s Hometime show is to be shared across the other Absolute-branded stations, with 7 separate playlists.
The programme, presented by Andy Bush and Richie Firth for the last year, will air on Absolute’s decades stations – 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s – as well as Absolute Classic Rock and the main station.
The split playlist technology developed by RCS and Bauer is already used on the Dave Berry Breakfast Show to enable genre specific music for each service alongside the live presenter content.
Paul Sylvester, Content Director for Absolute Radio, told RadioToday: “Hometime with Bush and Richie is one of the most ambitious shows on UK radio and it’s really resonated with listeners. Using our innovative technology to offer up the show to more people while adding content to our decade stations was the obvious next step.”
Andy Bush and Richie Firth said “The last year on Hometime has been some of the most fun we’ve had and as we celebrate one year on air we’re really excited for the show to grow and broadcast across the whole for the Absolute Radio Network.”
There are other changes to the schedules next week, with Chris Martin taking on a new evening show on Absolute 80s and Leona Graham hosting a new evening on show on Absolute Classic Rock.
The announcement comes weeks after Global introduced 70s and 90s stations on national DAB to go alongside Heart 80s. All three have live breakfast shows and automated music output for the rest of the day.
Not sure about this
I always wondered when this would happen – I had been thinking for years that if they can network the breakfast show on all seven station using the split playlist systems, why can’t they do the same with the Hometime show, and now it’s happening! I wish Virgin Radio could do the same for the Chris Evans Breakfast Show so have separate playlists for Virgin Radio, Virgin Radio Anthems and Virgin Radio Chilled!
Ask Virgin if they can do that, it’ll be a good idea and it makes sense, contact details below;
mike.cass@virginradio.co.uk
feedback@virginradio.co.uk
It’s networking where no ones job is lost. The other Absolute brand extensions were just jukebox playout on Drive until now so a good move.
So . . . that’s two presenters and seven stations at once?
Interesting tech to make that work.
Zetta playout system
Is this technology just not ‘as live’ with links pre-recorded just before they go out?
No. All links will be live. They currently do it on their breakfast show too.
Hopefully they can update audio to stereo on normal or dab+
Impressive technically, but in practice the limited playlist of the Absolute ‘sister stations’ can get further strangled by the time limitations of the records played on the main station.
Especially an issue with Absolute Classic Rock who feel they have to drop (rather than edit) all the tunes over 3m30s. So the rock channel goes pop, with ELO etc every hour…