We love radio and the NPO. Which is the only non-commercial broadcaster in the Netherlands with amazing content. For a long time we wanted to experiment with the future of radio so using the publicly available content of the NPO was the perfect combination. Adding a couple of weeks of development and we realised this prototype. Putting radio and the back catalogue of all music shows together in one optimised experience. It is important to note this version of the radio app is aimed to offer the best (popular) music experience, and therefore does not include current events like news or sports or the long tail content like podcasts.

Main idea

Regular radio is a monologue, which is no longer what users expect.

We came up with an app that holds all of NPO’s channels as live stations. When you open the app you are asked to log in to Spotify in order to play full-length songs, or you can skip to listen to 30 second previews. You are then presented with an overview of all channels and one additional channel on top called “saved tracks”. This is for every song you like and store while listening. If you click on a channel it starts playing the live broadcast, but you can also choose to go to shows. Shows is a back catalogue of all the shows that have been playing and of these shows automatically the playlists have been generated. Regardless of whether you’re listening to the live broadcast or to an older show’s playlist, you can always add the current playing song to your “saved tracks” (with the +). This a very simple function, but extremely useful.

Spotify SDK

For this app we used the Spotify SDK which beautifully supports the full integrated use of their catalogue. The Spotify integration is two ways. We use the catalogue for the playback within the app, but we also create your personal playlist within your Spotify account. This means that wherever you are, you can open Spotify and listen to the tracks you’ve saved. As a nice bonus, the playlist called “My radio - saved tracks” is at the top your Spotify, so every time you open Spotify you’re reminded subtly of the existence of Radio app.

CMS / Feed

Especially for this app we build a Content Management System which gathers all metadata of all the NPO’s radio channels, which information is publicily available. Shazam-like functionality was added to supplement any missing metadata, such as the song and artist name, necessary to find songs in the Spotify catalogue. With this metadata we search through Spotify and find the matching song and through this create a feed which is then fed to the app in order to display the auto-generated playlists of all shows.

Shazam

For every song that doesn’t provide the right metadata, we tested a Shazam-like audio fingerprinting technology to help out. By using this technology we can achieve a hit-rate of 95% on the popular channels.

Playlist

By knowing all the Spotify IDs we can auto-generate playlists of the shows on air. This creates a back catalogue without any effort, which is easily accessible without the spoken pieces by the DJs in between the songs.

Profiling

One of the ideas that we haven’t implemented - only tested roughly - is the recommendation of songs, shows, and artists of the NPO content wide. This is a logical next step, but falls outside of the scope of the prototype-experience we wanted to build.

Sonos / Airplay / Chromecast

Next Empire has a great relationship with Sonos. Through this we have gotten official access to their private APIs. We can use this to push any stream from any source directly from our custom app to the Sonos system in people’s houses. Meaning that the listen experience is no longer exclusive to either the Sonos app or the Spotify app. In addition, we implemented easy streaming through Apple’s Airplay protocol and Android’s Chromecast.

Prototype

We concepted, designed and build a fully working iOS prototype of this app. Complete amongst others with a custom CMS, audio fingerprinting, wireless playback integration and a new design with two radio experiences: LIVE and past shows.