Whether it be Andy Kershaw's eclectic mix of world music late on a Friday night, a Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 that is well past your bedtime, or Jon Carter mixing on Radio 1's Breezeblock after midnight, it's far easier to miss out on your favourite radio show than it is a TV programme. After all, radio shows don't have countless magazines and newspaper supplements devoted to telling you when they're on, and you're unlikely to tape them to listen to later in the same way as you would with a TV and video recorder. Add in the fact that people tend to be tuned into their station of choice rather than making "appointments to listen" to specific shows and an awful lot of enjoyable and relevant radio content passes most of us by.
But for those prepared to listen to the radio on the web (and put up with the attendant loss of quality that this entails), that could all soon change, thanks to a new radio player developed by the BBC's interactive arm, BBCi. It allows web users to listen to any specialist show from across the BBC's national stations over the past seven days, picking and choosing from hundreds of hours of content.
Appearing in a pop-up window on your desktop, the simple player - which uses Real Player technology - allows you to choose from two drop-down menus according to either radio station or genre. You then select the show you want to listen to and it plays in the background as long as you remain connected to the web, leaving you free to surf.
The simple addition of a list of shows based on musical genre will open up shows to people who would not normally listen to a particular station, believes Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Online. "Radio brands work both ways - they probably turn as many people off as they attract," he says. "A lot of people still think that Radio 3 is wall-to-wall classical music, for example. But it's changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Using the player, someone who would never usually tune into Radio 3 might stumble across something they love on Mixing It or the Andy Kershaw show, which they wouldn't otherwise have found."
The benefits are clear, and the new feature could particularly benefit Radio 1, believes Kimber. Not only does the station's target audience spend a lot of time on the web, but older listeners who have been put off the station due to its daytime playlist of chart pop and dance music might return to find something of interest among the late-night specialist shows.
But why restrict the output to specialist shows? "There's not much value in repeating Sara Cox's breakfast show or other topical shows, but if there's a programme that's on once a week or late at night then there's going to be a lot more interest," replies Kimber.
The technology behind the player is far from new but, like much of the BBC's recent new media output, it utilises the vast resources available elsewhere in the corporation to good effect. Many of Radio 4's shows, including Today and The Archers, are already archived, but the introduction of the radio player marks a first for the music-based stations. "It's been my holy grail for three years to offer the specialist shows on demand. I've been dying to do this since 1998 but it's taken until now to get to the point where we can launch it," says Kimber.
The sticking point has been in agreeing terms with the record companies who control copyright restrictions on the music played. In a world where the music giants are paranoid about the threat posed by the internet to their industry, it was an arduous task to persuade them to allow shows that often contain records played months before their release to be archived. To mollify them, the BBC has agreed to archive shows for seven days only and to make them available only "as live", and not for download on to a PC. You can skip through the shows in 15-minute chunks, but it is not possible to rewind them to listen to the same track again and again.
"We managed to persuade them that it is streaming and not downloading. We're not saying, 'Listen to the new Eminem track over and over again.' It's a bit of an experiment for them, too," says Kimber. In any case, as he points out, if listeners are so desperate to copy a track, they could simply tape it off the radio anyway.
Internet radio has travelled a rocky road up until now. While popular with punters, like so much else on the web it has proved almost impossible to make any money out of. Of course, the BBC is unencumbered by such fiscal concerns and can instead concentrate on making the best use of the technology to the benefit of its listeners.
Kimber also makes the argument that by redistributing its shows in this way, the BBC is providing better value for its licence-fee payers. "There was a bout of intense competition about two years ago. Now it feels like a lot of that has died down. But we don't want to be ploughing a lone furrow - we want to be one of a number of players," he says.
The BBC has been accused in the past of being slow to catch on to the benefits of online radio, initially limiting itself to streaming certain stations while others were experimenting with interactivity and personalised playlists. Yet now that expensive online radio experiments from commercial stations, such as Chrysalis's Puremix, have long ago withered on the vine, the BBC clearly sees its chance. "As a publicly funded body with a steady income, now is the right time for us to be pushing forward, but that will change as the economic cycle turns," says Kimber.
Like most others in the industry, Kimber believes that simply streaming stations on the web is very much the thin end of the wedge when it comes to possibilities for online radio. The BBC's radio-on-demand service and others like it are far more likely to be of interest to audiences than the simple replaying, at worse quality, of shows that they can hear elsewhere.
Likewise, niche stations such as those broadcast by Capital FM from its kikido.com website and brand extensions such as NME Radio on the NME.com site work because they provide exclusive, web-only service. And stations that are unavailable to most - the BBC's new digital services, such as 6 Music, and Capital Radio's London-only XFM - can benefit greatly from web coverage.
Encouragingly for these services, online radio listening is increasing dramatically. More than one in six of the population aged 15 or over tuned in to an online radio service at least once between January and March, according to Rajar, the body that monitors radio listening figures. And with broadband take-up finally reaching meaningful levels, online radio listening is becoming a more mainstream activity and thus perceived less as a "geeky" pastime for web addicts only. When you can have instant high-speed access to the web all day, the idea of using it to listen to the radio while doing other things is a less alien concept.
For Kimber, it's all about getting people hooked and, once the fear factor is removed, he believes that the content will speak for itself. "As the BBC we have a job to do in terms of explaining how to download the player and so on. I feel a responsibility for getting people to dabble in audio. If people think something's good enough, they'll make the effort.
"This could fundamentally change the way that people listen to radio, and a lot of people have yet to catch on to that."