'That's television, isn't it?' I hear you cry. No, it isn't. But the combining of radio programmes with web video is an interesting phenomenon that warrants exploration.
It's become known as 'visualisation' and it's becoming increasingly popular and sophisticated, as Roger Bolton reported for Feedback on BBC Radio 4.
He interviewed Victoria Derbyshire, whose mid-morning programme on BBC Radio 5 Live is broadcast as sound on the radio and video on the web, thanks to cameras streaming a simultaneous feed of what's happening in the studio.
The 2010 general election marked a watershed because it was then, says Derbyshire, that the convergence of simultaneously broadcast sound and video chimed with the audience. "We did various election broadcasts around the country featuring top politicians and audiences of 300 voters," she recalls, "and we streamed our debate from Luton on immigration via the 5 Live website... 289,000 people watched that on a Tuesday morning at ten o'clock, for an election debate."
The same election campaign witnessed web pictures from a radio studio of Gordon Brown, head buried in his hands, as Jeremy Vine broke the news to the then prime minister that he'd been tape-recorded calling a Labour supporter a bigot.
Elsewhere on the dial, Matt Edmondson's piggyback chats and Benjamin Chesterton's photo films add a web-based visual dimension to a medium that was hitherto audio-only. Listeners can tap into it, or not as the case may be, making visualisation an accessory increasingly seen as essential by programme-makers.
But doesn't the trend towards visual bolt-ons threaten to undermine the craft of the radio journalist and producer: painting pictures with sound? 5 Live's Interactive Editor, Nigel Smith, disagrees:
"You will never get the sense of 'I'm missing out' by not being able to watch the programme. What visualisation does is add something. By filming things in the studio and then being able to put them on YouTube, we have a far greater success at getting that content to a wider audience."
All in all, visualisation is a powerful magnet broadcasters can use to attract a new audience for radio. And it's here to stay.
You can download the podcast Visualising Radio from the BBC College of Production.
