Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on products that support streaming, podcasting and online content delivery.
As the NPR and PBS member station for North Texas, KERA’s stations 90.1 KERA News, KXT 91.7 and WRR 101.1 FM serve the fourth-largest population area in the U.S. across broadcast, web, social media and increasingly streaming applications.
Recently, KERA’s audience development team was tasked with improving the user experience. The ability to rewind live content was among the top requests.
“The ability to pause and rewind live radio is not something we’ve been able to offer until now,” said Alan Melson, VP, digital media at KERA. “It’s about giving people extra functionality and flexibility; we wanted listeners to be able to go back minutes or hours, or listen to an entire program from the start.
“We needed a tool that we didn’t have to build ourselves, but which gave us the option of building a front end. We found that SGrewind from StreamGuys not only provides that functionality out of the box, but also gives us some flexibility on how to deploy it.”
SGrewind uses the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol, an adaptive HTTP format designed for streaming video and audio content and easy to integrate. It is in use for KERA’s 90.1 NPR News and Information station. StreamGuys partnered with Public Media Apps on the service, which initially launched on KERA’s mobile app, developed by Public Media Apps. The station is planning to incorporate the functionality to its website over the next 18 months.
“It has a clean user experience that makes sense immediately when people open the app,” said Melson. “The live player is fixed at the bottom of the screen, so however you are interacting with the app, the player always provides access to play, stop, rewind and forward buttons.”
Melson said StreamGuys recently helped KERA re-architect its workflow and incorporate a hardware upgrade across our Wheatnet AoIP system. “It created a direct handoff from the studio network to the streaming encoder and is an all-in-one streaming encoder which is configurable over the network. They really helped us get it up and running quickly.”
