It is so important to get your programming to where your audience is. As of the end of 2017 only 88% of homes have radios. This number is expected to decline with the invention of the smart speaker. Millennials don’t even own radios. They have their phone, laptop, tablet, smart speaker, and Bluetooth/Sirius/Pandora/iHeartRadio enabled car stereos. As the new generation grows up, it is important to deliver content to where they are, and this means, you must have your radio broadcasting online. Once your station is online, you can expand to websites, mobile apps, smart speakers, TuneIn, and many other services.
Look at the facts, Jacobs Media’s 2017 Tech Survey reported that 11% of radio listeners have smart speakers, “manual (technologies) are fading and becoming secondary to the handsfree, voice-activated environment. Radio needs to move in that direction to fit in” (Jacobs, 2017). There is a projected growth in this area, in 2016 only 7% of 118.48 million households had smart speakers, Voicebot.ai and Gartner Research project 94.2 million households of 125.65 million will own smart speakers by 2020. This is a 7% to 75% jump in just a few years. Gartner Research is predicting that 30% of all our technology will be voice controlled in 2018. According to the US Edison Research “Share of Ear” study (Podcast Familiarity) 1 in 5 minutes of audio listened to in the US is on smartphones. Join the Movement.
It doesn’t take much to get your signal from your automation machine to the internet. For demonstration purposes, we will be using Simian and an AudioScience audio card.
The following are needed to get your stream online:
View a tutorial on setting up the Barix Instreamer
A couple stations (out of many) that use this setup are