Media Forum: Is SunTalk a serious station?

Can the internet brand become commercially viable, Alasdair Reid asks.

On launch day, it only took 'top radio star' Jon Gaunt a couple of hours on air to get to the nub of the matter. No - not whether his first guest on his new SunTalk show, the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, David Cameron, might one day become Prime Minister.

Cameron was certainly an impressive bag for the first show. But a far more pressing issue, especially where Gaunt's pride and sense of well-being is concerned, is the question of whether SunTalk is actually a proper radio station or not.

On balance, Gaunt revealed that he thought it was - the internet, he reasoned, is the way forward. Which is just as well, as it happens, because SunTalk is available only on the internet - streamed live between 10am and 1pm each day courtesy of thesun.co.uk and then available in 'listen again' or download format thereafter. And for those on the move, it can be turned into virtual radio by streaming the service via smart phones on to Bluetooth-enabled car stereos.

SunTalk is an interesting move for all sorts of reasons - not least in the choice of Gaunt as the figurehead of such a cutting-edge initiative Billed as 'the most rabid ranter' on radio, this is the man who parted company with talkSPORT, when some of the rabid ranting became hard for it to swallow.

As a Sun columnist, he fits perfectly with the title; and News International is serious about spreading its brands across as many delivery platforms as possible - but at this stage, SunTalk remains a relatively modest proposal. Commercially, for instance, there's little in the pipeline, beyond jokey talk of it offering a sort of local events noticeboard - ad hoc commercials for car boot sales, fetes, that sort of thing.

So for now, it will function primarily as a marketing extravagance - seen much in the same way as the podcasts of upmarket newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph are.