Time to fix your radio player?

You only discover the things that irritate your users if they irritate you. And that means trying to use a website just like they would. If you make websites, you ought to use them.

And that goes for you if you are an in-house team. If you’re a software engineer or a UX designer, you should be spending at least a few hours a week using those tools on that website or intranet. At least. And your partners in the content division should actively welcome that.

But. There’s one bit I bet you’ll not use, even if you use your own website every day.

Your web player. You know, the thing that hundreds of people use every single day to play your radio station live.

You never use your web player, do you? After all, you’ve got the radio station on in the office, don’t you? So have you really used it as your users would use it? Does it offer the best functionality?

• Does it work properly on the Mac? (CBC Radio 1 Toronto’s gives me a blank screen with no audio controls, for example, and CBC Radio 1 Vancouver simply doesn’t work until you read the ’special Mac instructions’)
• Does it work properly on WebKit browsers, like Safari or Google Chrome? (Chrome accounts for 9% of all visits to this blog).
• Do all the elements on the page display correctly? (Virgin Radio Canada’s display of the last songs played is almost invisible and clearly not as designed)
• Does it look as good as the others in your market? (I should have been able to fix this one, you’d have thought, had the politics not beaten me)
• Does all the data display correctly at all times of day? (Capital FM in London is currently telling me in their player that I’m listening to Rich & amp; Kate, for example)
• Does it actually work? (Punching up listen live on Absolute Radio’s site takes me, after five seconds, to the home-page; and no listen-live window in sight: Chrome is mistaking the player for a pop-up window).
• Does it actually play well? (Why is it that some UK stations buffer for me at home, on the same connection that copes happily with BBC iPlayer high-def programming?)
• Does your radio station have a 24-hour operation? (No longer the case, but in March of this year, a 3am call to fix, um, this one resulted in the support team telling me that nobody would look at it until 9.00am).

As I show above, we’re all guilty of not spending enough time on our players. I’m yet to see a player which gets everything right – from the streaming to the features inside the player itself.

Which is why I’d like to float the idea, odd though it is, of out-sourcing the coding of your radio player.

Spending a few hours at Streamtheworld’s offices in Montréal last week, I was struck by how the business operates. It has two large coding teams, working on the encoding and CDN networks the company operates, but also on the players that the company makes. They’re the first radio player specialists I’ve ever seen.

I leaned over one designer, who was working on a new design for a major-market radio station, skinning it to reflect advertising from a blue-chip financial company. The player design was striking, and the information within it was far more useful than, um, this one, for example. Yet how many of us have one designer working full-time on our radio players, let alone as many as this company does?

And, of course, every click within the player is monitorable; so, from the hundreds of players the company works on, they’ve a sensible amount of data to make them all better.

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t out-source much of your website. Your applications are just as much ‘content’ as your radio output; and if you out-source them to the same company that does everyone else’s website, you’re guaranteed not to offer your audience anything that they can get elsewhere. But. I’m not sure the same goes for your web player; at least, the basics of getting your web player working well.

If we’re going to take the internet seriously as a broadcast platform, surely we should be concentrating on getting our radio players right? It would seem to me that it’s a bright idea to bring in specialists who understand how radio players work. Trouble is, I didn’t realise there were any companies who specialised in them. Until a few days ago.

I’m travelling round the world, meeting radio stations and sharing experiences. I’m next in San Francisco, Toronto and Dallas; and in the far east (Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Australia) after Christmas. Please do contact me if you’re in one of these cities and I can come and see you; either for a chat over a beer, or a full presentation about new media in the UK radio industry.