Download the details here.

Ask anyone in the media business, and they’ll tell you that 2012 is likely to be the year of ‘connected TVs’. They’re referring to the trend for people to buy tellies that can hook up to your wi-fi and give you stuff not only from your TV aerial/satellite/cable connection, but also through the internet. And apparently we’re increasingly connecting things to our TVs that are themselves connected to the internet – like set-top boxes, games consoles and Blu-ray players.

This opens up a few interesting possibilities for Radioplayer….

1) As TVs get more user-friendly, we should be able to make Radio easier to find. Ideally, under one button.
2) Instead of just a few dozen stations, we should be able to offer listeners more choice (there are now 307 stations in Radioplayer).
3) And while you’re listening, we could show you more interesting/useful stuff on your screen, using the internet connection.

So, we’re looking to work with a company that has experience in this ‘connected TV app’ area. Today, we’re kicking off a very fast selection process, which starts with a ‘Request for Expressions of Interest’. If you’re a firm with the right expertise, you can download the details here.

Though not without its own issues, community radio offers a strong proposition for both advertisers and listeners; with niche content, rich in localness and personality.

There is a broad range of community radio stations in this country, many of which are now becoming interested in Radioplayer. Just today TCR FM launched a neat sponsored console, with a fantastic contact box, as well as detailed user-friendly playlist information.

In fact, simply carrying out a quick search for community stations on Radioplayer shows the diverse range of community stations already signed up.

Cross Rhythms City Radio is a great example of what a small community radio station can do using very little resource. With latest track information, artist profile, song rating, web-cam capability, studio contacts and social networking links, it’s packed full of great features.

But the functionality that has been implemented best is the “Listen Again” tab. Although it’s slightly hidden on the console, when clicked it takes users to an alphabetised list of previously aired shows with a short synopsis of each broadcast, making finding the content you want easy.

BCB in Bradford is another flagship community. The console is clear, bright and distinctive with all interaction directing the user straight to the BCB website where there’s a blog, a collection of podcasts and multiple social networking links.

We’re starting at a relatively small base, but the number of community stations is rapidly growing on Radioplayer and more are joining every month. Now with over 300 stations, the majority of broadcasters joining Radioplayer are community stations.

Radioplayer helps create a level playing field. By launching consoles, community stations are strengthening their position, growing audiences and ensuring that they are only one click away from some of the largest broadcasters in the UK.

We’re keen for as many community stations to join as possible. The Radioplayer team is able to assist stations in setting up their metadata and if needed even build specific consoles.

If you’re involved in community radio and interested in joining Radioplayer, please use the Contact tab to get in touch.

300 is a milestone because it’s roughly double the number of stations we launched with in the Spring. But more importantly, the last few months have seen dozens of commercial, student, community, and hospital stations using the simple ‘DIY’ tool-kit we developed. And we’ve run a successful series of ‘surgeries’ to help them create their own bespoke consoles.

‘Splash FM’, which became our 300th station today, is a great example of a relatively small commercial radio group seeing the advantages of joining Radioplayer. It’s a ‘level playing-field’, which puts them one click away from the biggest stations in the UK, and millions of potential listeners.

It also enables them to take advantage of the innovative development we’re doing on behalf of the whole industry. Our new apps are good examples of this. They’re designed to capitalise on the fact that we now have hundreds of stations and thousands of programmes in a common interface, by putting radio right under people’s noses.

The first, based on ‘Adobe AIR’, installs a radio in your PC, Mac or Linux computer and puts an icon in your ‘Start’ menu. The app launches Radioplayer with just one click, even without a browser open. It behaves exactly like a radio, opening at the last station you listened to. It was built by a clever developer in Cornwall, called Robin Wilding.

The second app puts a Radioplayer button prominently at the top of Google’s popular ‘Chrome’ browser, just one click away. That was the brainchild of ‘radio futurologist’ James Cridland. Both these new apps join the existing Radioplayer Facebook app (made by the folks at Folder Media) on our new apps page. Download them and give them a go – and watch out for more stations, and more innovation, over the coming months.

This has prompted enquiries about how other countries could adopt similar models – which would be beneficial for the digital radio landscape around the world, as it could lead to a harmonisation of standards and approaches. 

In keeping with the spirit of partnership which led to its inception, UK Radioplayer Ltd (the not-for-profit company set up to run and develop Radioplayer) is asking for ‘Expressions of Interest’ from anyone who’s interested in working together, to explore the international opportunities. 

There are details in the document you can download below. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any further information.

Radioplayer – request for expressions of interest

We wanted to offer first-time users of Radioplayer a quick guide to its main features. This is in response to questions from users about how to save their favourites in ‘My Stations’, and how to use the main controls. So from today, if you click ‘listen’ on our website, and we detect that you haven’t listened to a Radioplayer station yet, you get a short video tour, delivered in a specially adapted Radioplayer console. If we think you have visited Radioplayer before, the player opens at the last station you listened to – just like a radio. You can preview the video tour using the button below (whether you’ve visited before or not). 

And we’ve been getting questions from websites and radio stations about how best to link to Radioplayer. So we’ve built a neat little ‘button generator’, which  creates a button that pops the correctly-sized window for Radioplayer. You can choose whether the button should launch a specific station, or act like a radio (opening at the station the user last played, or the video introduction if it’s their first visit). This is the start of our plans to spread radio across the web, and make it easier to ‘stumble across’ great programmes and stations. You can find it here.

Both these features have been built by the folks at Folder Media, but are very much the product of the collaborative development style we’re adopting at Radioplayer. Here’s a short fly-on-the-wall video of a collaborative workshop we organised recently, attended by 25 developers and designers from across the radio industry. There are more to come – stay tuned.

The answer is, through a mixture of well-targeted digital campaigns, promotion across our member stations, clever links and widgets on third-party websites, and  – the best marketing tool of all – word of mouth. Here’s an example of the first of those – our online launch campaign, shown as a series of banner ‘frames’ .

Radioplayer banner sequence

It ran on a range of news and entertainment sites including The Guardian, Metro, MSN, Yahoo, Channel 4, YouTube, and MTV. A simple sequence of messages, resolving in a ‘now playing’ panel, which the user clicked to ‘pop’ that station’s Radioplayer. This reached an estimated 9 million potential users across a 5-week period. 

There have been some notable examples of great Radioplayer promotion so far, from Absolute Radio, the BBC (who are currently running a month-long campaign across all their stations), and Smooth Radio, who kindly helped us make a series of trails which can be run by any Radioplayer station across the UK. Here’s a selection of those – and we’d love to hear any other great examples of radio stations explaining Radioplayer to their listeners.

Community station Gaydio, and student stations Crush and URY all managed to create great-looking Radioplayer consoles of their own, and are now standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the biggest brands in UK Radio. Crush and URY were both guinea-pigs for a new  ‘self-service’ tool we’re launching, which will help smaller stations build their own versions of Radioplayer to the same standards as the rest of the industry. If you’re involved with a small commercial, community or student station, drop us a line through the ‘contact’ page, and we’ll talk you through how to get into Radioplayer.  

Back to those figures  – we’ve discovered that an amazing 5.7 million people listened via Radioplayer across the last 4 weeks.  Rewind a few months, to when we demonstrated the first ‘alpha’ version featuring just 5 stations, and that sort of figure seemed a long way off. So many questions remained to be answered -

Could a user switch seamlessly between hundreds of separate players – and feel like they were in one product?  How long would it take them to get into the habit of using the search engine, and saving their favourite stations? Can Radioplayer really help the whole industry – including small commercial, community, and student stations?

We’re now in a position to start answering some of those questions and we’ve begun to draw some early (if fairly impressionistic) conclusions about how people seem to be using Radioplayer. 

5.7 million unique users listened via Radioplayer across a 4-week period 

22.5 million Radioplayer consoles were launched or switched by those users 

We’ve grown from 157 stations 8 weeks ago, to 238 – with many more to come 

About 20% of Radioplayer users seem to be sampling more than one station 

 We’re right at the start of what will be a very long game – so we’ll come back with more updates as we see clearer trends. As I said at the start, our priority right now is to grow the Radioplayer network, to include every Ofcom-licensed station that wants to join.  Drop us a message if you have any questions, or if you want to be added to the list. 

It takes into account not only the ‘editorial relevance’ of the search term that’s entered, but also a sense of ‘now-ness’ (happening right now, about to happen, or just happened), and location (based on a place name or postcode in the search query). These factors are important to the medium of radio.

It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be refining it over coming weeks in response to user feedback, and the actual terms people are searching for. We’re still developing the means to analyse the huge volume of searches taking place across the Radioplayer network, so it’ll be a while before we can share detailed search stats.

But in the meantime, here’s an impressionistic snapshot of the most commonly-searched individual words and numbers across a few days. The relative sizes of the terms  are broadly indicative of the number of times they were entered (but only very broadly). It’s in the form of a ‘Wordle’.

The Economist on ‘an old medium getting its digital act together’…

On the Gadget Helpline blog, they like the easy search feature…

Music Week covered the launch from the perspective of the music industry…

The Radio and Marketing blog reviewed our launch marketing campaign…

 And there was a comprehensive analysis of the brand and business implications from Maisie McCabe at Brand Republic