Radio World publishes User Reports on products in various equipment classes throughout the year to help potential buyers understand why a colleague made a given equipment choice. These are unpaid testimonials by users who have already purchased the gear. A Radio World Product Evaluation, by contrast, is a freelance article by a paid reviewer who typically receives a demo loaner.
ANTWERP, Belgium — When we launched Nostalgie in 2008, Internet streaming was not our main concern. We set up one main server in order to satisfy our audience’s demand, but we never bothered with in-depth analyses.
(click thumbnail)
In the meantime, Nostalgie has tripled its initial market share (from 1.7 percent to 5.63 percent in 12 and older), and so have our streaming servers as we experienced the same boom in our online listeners. Because of the limited reporting tools available at the time we began looking for a new reporting tool.
It was our service provider who suggested taking a closer look into Casterstats from Touchcast. This system has the possibility to monitor multiple servers in “real time” and combine them into “single-stream” statistics. The user interface looked promising and the specifications indicated high level reporting for different types of users.
We installed a copy of the Casterstats Collector on a network server to retrieve available audience data from our streams. A wizard guided us through the set-up process, so we had it running in no time.
After launching the Dashboard we could see our current online audience and individual server status. The system can be customized by the user to show any desired data, in real time, on any connected client. Needless to say we have found this a practical feature.
Reporting tools
The historical reporting tool was thorough, giving us many unexpected insights on how our streams were used. I was impressed with the quality and detail of the data that had been sleeping on our hard drive for a long time.
The tool provided not only the standard information but also interesting data on the software players used by our audiences — information that will help us with decisions on further development of our technology — as well as information about our audience’s demographics.
On one hand, operators and producers like the Dashboard as they can visualize the audience in real-time. On the other, our technical staff appreciates the access to information on the server status. Our marketing department, being used to relying on audience panels that are only published twice a year, now has a powerful solution that will give instant access to listening trends, even in real time. This allows them to present accurate and up-to-date information about our listeners to existing and potential advertisers.
We work closely with the team at Touchcast, who have been helpful with advice. They listen positively to our upgrading suggestions, improving their product constantly. Version 2.0, to be released shortly, looks promising including lots of features such as new reports including playlist analytics (combined with audience) and other technical related reports, as well as a redesigned Dashboard and support for more streaming servers.
Bas Boone is chief engineer with Nostalgie Vlaanderen.
For information, contact CasterStats in Belgium at 011-32-2-808-12-08 or visitwww.casterstats.com.
