Radioplayer

RadioPlayer, the online radio platform that aggregates more than 300 UK commercial and BBC stations, has launched its app for the Apple iPhone and iPad.

"Our aim was to create a simple app that showcases the amazing variety of UK radio," said Michael Hill, Managing Director of RadioPlayer. "The fact we’ve built one that’s also beautiful, innovative, and a joy to use, is testament to the power of partnerships." Hill spoke at both our recent RAIN Summit Dallas (here) and at Friday's RAIN Summit Europe in Berlin.

RadioPlayer, which launched in March of last year, reportedly attracts seven million unique listeners a month. The group says an app for Android phones is in the works.

Read more in TheNextWeb here.

You many know Radioplayer (see RAIN coverage here) is the online aggregate of radio in Britain, 315 streaming audio channels and on-demand content. It's a not-for-profit cooperative co-owned by the BBC and (most of) the UK's commercial radio industry, launched one year ago this month.

Today Radioplayer boasts seven million monthly unique users. And it represents a victory in successfully transitioning traditional media to an online platform, compared to television in the UK, says Emma Barnett, The Telegraph's Digital Media Editor.

"Where British TV companies have failed... the radio industry has genuinely managed to build a successful aggregator through clever cooperation and by focusing on the product, rather than the potential new revenue streams," she wrote. "British TV content crucially still doesn’t have a single web player."

Each participating station is given equal prominence in the player, and each displays their own advertising and content. And there is total autonomy for each contributing station. Radioplayer managing director Michael Hill credits the platform's success to "its fairness, openness and its not-for-profit status."

Radioplayer also generates revenue (which goes back into developing and improving the player) by licensing its technology. Two such improvements are the coming mobile app and an app for Internet connected television systems (more here).

Read coverage from The Telegraph here.

The UK's all-in-one web radio platform Radioplayer is developing "ways for radio stations to offer live, simultaneous video streams via connected TVs, including synchronized ads," reports New Media Age.

“Currently, the visual user experience for radio on TV sets is very clunky," said Radioplayer UK MD Michael Hill. "We think we can improve on both the navigation and what you see when you are listening. We will offer radio stations the ability to run live video content and ads, along with display slideshows, album art or any other visual that individual station may want.”

You can find more coverage here.

The UK's all-in-one web radio platform Radioplayer has launched apps for PC, Mac or Linux computers along with a widget for Google's Chrome web browser. 

The apps join Radioplayer's Facebook app (RAIN coverage here). "Radioplayer hopes they will lead to commercial tie-ups with computer manufacturers and retailers to 'pre-install' Radioplayer on to computers," writes MediaWeek (here).

You can find Radioplayer's apps here.

The UK's Absolute Radio has redesigned its Radioplayer web interface. Updates include the ability to synchronize visuals and other info with the audio content. 

New Media Age has more coverage here, while radio expert James Cridland has a review of the changes here. You can read more coverage about the UK's all-in-one web radio platform Radioplayer in RAIN here, here and here.

Industry news source Inside Radio polled its readers yesterday on whether the U.S. radio industry needs "a single industry-wide streaming app to help defend against Pandora and other pureplays." That is, imagine a receiver as universal as a transistor radio, but that would receive every broadcast stream from every broadcast station in the nation.

Opinion was split, slightly (55% to 45%) in favor of a national online aggregator.

One supporter of the idea wrote, "We’ve created a veritable Tower of Babel for listeners wanting to use our Internet streams — they shouldn’t have to take lots of extra time figuring out how to download the correct app and player to hear us."

Such an aggregator actually already exists, as you may know, in the UK. Radioplayer is a non-profit consortium of media companies (the BBC, Global Radio, Guardian Media Group, Absolute Radio and RadioCentre) that has created a standard online audio player for live, on-demand and podcast radio from hundreds of stations in the UK. RAIN reported last week (here) the 282 stations streaming via Radioplayer attracted 6.7 million unique visitors in August. Radioplayer launched in March of this year.

A critic of the idea suggested, "Competition is critical and should be encouraged — uniformity means compromising."

Subscribe to Inside Radio here.