NewsStar is a custom news platform popular in Germany that serves more than 100 stations hourly. Radio.Cloud is bringing it to the U.S. market.
“Fifteen years ago, the concept behind NewsStar was similar to the goal that we have with Radio.Cloud today: provide hyper-localized news content to stations,” said Founder/CEO Christian Brenner. Its flexible operation replaced traditional satellite-delivered news.
Affiliate stations build a news profile and select from a library of national, state and local news stories along with other content like weather and sports. At present there are some 90 unique news profiles created hourly, and the resulting news reports are distributed to user stations.
“Each hour, reporters populate the NewsStar portal with stories and actualities,” Radio.Cloud stated.
“Based on what each affiliate station wants — for example, two national stories + two local stories + weather, or one national story + two state stories + two local stories — NewsStar compiles the stories into one newscast and distributes the audio to each station.”
Radio.Cloud is using the capabilities of Amazon Web Services, which it says enables NewsStar to be a fast, flexible and stable application for daily use. Ninety versions of news are produced and distributed in less than 10 seconds. “This enables the news content itself to be as up to date as possible each hour and reduce stress for the staff to a minimum.”
