UK Radioplayer Console

& Unified Station

Management Application

2013 Student Radio Awards

Submission for ‘Best Technical Achievement’

Jonty Usborne

Director of Online Media

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Conception and Motivation

After the launch of UK Radioplayer, URB was impressed by the tech-nical innovation exhibited by some participating stations but generallyunderwhelmed by the interfaces o�ered, even by some industry lead-ers. We wanted our own console that could compete nationwide onuser experience and capability.

Listenership of a small student station like URB is dominated byusers who have a direct connection to the University, station, or pre-senters directly. With this in mind, development focused around theintegration of the listener and presenter experience to produce a muchmore personal and dynamic relationship between the broadcasters andaudience. The console would benefit the station, presenters and lis-teners mutually.

“Targeted, Visualised, Interactive”

The Radioplayer Experience

Users who first access URB’s online player will be presented with acontent packed, yet simple and intuitive interface allowing them toexplore a raft of material without feeling overwhelmed.

Extensive music information is quickly accessible, allowing a userto find the name of the song overheard earlier, and explore similartracks and artists. Integration with services like iTunes and Spotifyallows the URB experience to impact their daily music choices.

As a local station, city-related tweets, weather and tra�c updateswere also incorporated prominently. Direct integration with the Avon& Somerset Constabulary’s system allows for immediate notificationof any road accidents or pertinent rush hour news.1

Requests are accepted and either messaged to the studio, or han-dled by our playout server which determines suitability (based on lastplay time and appropriateness for the time of day). Users have full ac-cess to the catalogue of URB Podcasts, the ability to quickly messagethe studio with only one spam challenge per session, and can feedbackpositively or negatively on the currently playing song.

1As the police’s REST API is still under development at the time of writing

this feature has not yet been fully rolled out publicly

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User Accounts and Data Acquisition

The entire console is closely integrated with the University of Bath’snetwork. When accessing the console all users pass through a Shib-boleth Single-Sign-On gateway which automatically logs them intoURB’s service passively if appropriate.

Beyond the benefits enjoyed by logged-in users, URB also gleansvaluable information, allowing us to gain a stronger understandingof our audience. Beyond generic analytics, logged-in users providemore detailed (anonymous) information including demographics rang-ing from DoB to academic department.

This information allows us to design our programming to moree�ectively reflect our listenership. Music tastes (established via votingand requests) provide an insight into what type of people enjoy whattype of music, and when they tend to listen.

All this information is collected strictly in accordance

with the University’s data and privacy policies.

Targeted Content

In a similar way, it is possible to target unique outbound content.In collaboration with University and Students’ Union databases, it ispossible to establish which current listeners are members of certainclubs, academic courses, accommodation blocks, or any other user-defined grouping. This can be used to deliver personalised content.

For example, when a user launches the Radioplayer window, beforestreaming live audio it could query if the user is logged in and if sowhether they have voted in SU elections. If not, an advert remindingthem to do so could be played before launching the URB stream.

Visualised Content

Automatically supplementing on-air content with synchronised visualmaterial was first implemented in the form of clickable images display-ing during advertising slots. In a way similar to that adopted by Ab-solute’s InStream platform, images are superimposed over the pluginspace at the same time as the corresponding audio is broadcast. Thisapproach works during server managed programming as the precisestart and end times of ad-packages can be pre-determined. A similarapproach will shortly be expanded to content beyond advertising.

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Presenter / Studio Control

The entire console was developed with two end-user groups in mind:the listeners, and the presenters. The presenters are just as involved.They not only receive real-time information on their current listeners,but can remotely push content to them from the studio. Presenterscan force a user’s window to display certain aspects of the console (au-tomatically displaying the webcam during a visual link for example)and even type messages (including photos or links) which can be dis-played to an individual listener in response to an incoming message,a group of people, or all listeners.

Unified Station Management Application

The launch of our Radioplayer console, and the demand for back-endcontrol, sparked the largest technological revelation within the stationthis year. Rather than establish an independent control panel, anapplication was developed which consolidated all of URB’s back-endservices into a single portal.

Integrated with the University’s Central Authentication Service,and based on LDAP groups for authorisation, users log into a sin-gle web-based application to control almost every aspect of the sta-tion. (Including: on-air management, programming, audio logging,web content, advert management, podcasts, sta� membership, train-ing, project tracking)

Some existing systems were integrated into the new platform, andmany new features were developed. The hub of the system is the on-air element. Presenters are able to switch station output and controlinformation such as the currently playing track. All incoming com-munication to the station is displayed including missed phone calls,voicemail messages, and Radioplayer correspondance. Outbound mes-sages are composed from the same platform.

The system also schedules events (such as automatically adjustingstation output or adjusting the volume at certain on-campus broad-cast locations). It automatically cancels shows for which presentersdon’t turn up and if the studio is live when it shouldn’t be, or there issilence detected, the system sends SMS text messages to quickly alertmanagement.

Not only has this platform optimised station management, butwith central access to all systems via a single portal, sta� trainingand capability awareness has dramatically improved.

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Screenshots

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