Why has Radioplayer been upgraded and what are the benefits?
A lot has changed since Radioplayer was first launched in 2011. The platform that was originally developed has served us well, but as we grew and needed to support additional territories, maintaining it has become an overhead that has stopped us innovating and adding new features. Additionally, the previous system was developed using old technologies that are no longer maintained, and there will soon come a point where we will not be able to update it at all without investing significant effort to upgrade or replace these old components.
Therefore we have been redeveloping the platform to take advantage of the latest technologies and build a system that will support our ambitions well into the future.
The first version of the new platform is intended to be a like-for-like replacement of the old, but with some changes to how we handle users, stations, and podcasts that are more fit for purpose in the current state of broadcasting.
The biggest architectural change is that we no longer have an instance of the platform for each territory; we have developed one system that all our users will log into to maintain their territory and stations. Users that have access to multiple territories will be able to switch between them. Having a shared system allows us to roll out updates to all our users at the same time.
This change also means that territories will be charged more fairly according to their usage; the way that the old system was set up meant that smaller territories were overprovisioned in terms of the server capacity that was available, with servers that sat idling the majority of the time. In contrast, this also meant that our larger territories were sometimes underprovisioned; they were sized according to ‘usual’ amounts of traffic, but could not be easily scaled up and may struggle to handle sudden bursts in popularity due to some regional event.
The new system automatically scales up to handle bursts in traffic, handling increases in a region, while smaller territories only pay for the capacity needed to support their own listeners.
The system has the following new features
Improved user management
We have changed how users are given access to stations that they manage. Previously this was managed by the station’s account - a user would be attached to the account, which gave them access to stations within that account.
This was not flexible enough for some users who needed access to stations that were in many accounts. We have changed the station access so this is managed by “User Groups”. A “User Group” can have many users, and many stations. All users in the group will have access to all the stations in that group.
A user can be in many groups, which then lets them maintain stations across many accounts - either to update the station record, or to approve changes made to station records.
Users can also have access to many territories; they will have a single login to administer all their stations.
Podcasts
We have improved how we manage podcasts; a station owner can now create a podcast and attach it to many stations, rather than having to add many feeds (and potentially the same feed many times) to an individual station.
We have also improved the podcast validation process; when you add a podcast we inspect the url to extract the podcast series name, description and images. If there is a problem with your feed you will see immediately.
Station image tools
When you modify a station’s branding, we have added new tools that can help you crop or resize the station images from a single ‘master’.
You can also choose a background colour to provide a single backdrop for your image, in case you are converting a square image into a landscape image and want to scale it up. In this case, we recommend that you use Firefox as it has an integrated eye-dropper tool that you can use to choose a colour from anywhere on the page you are looking at.
Station footprint tools
We have developed a new tool to help you define your station footprint. You can now add, move and delete waypoints into an existing footprint. The footprint is also automatically closed, once you have set a minimum of three waypoints.
Single ‘source of truth’
Now when you submit station updates to us via Ingest, we apply the station update in the user interface before pushing the modifications through to the search system. This means that you can always see the latest version of your station, irrespective of how you maintain your station record.
Support for the latest version of the DAB EPG specification
We support the latest version of the DAB EPG specification when you send station or programme updates to us. The differences between the old and new specification is described here. However, the key difference is that the new specification has better support for programmes available on demand.
Support for TVAnytime Genres
We have standardised our station and podcast genres to match the TVAnytime specification.
The list of TV Anytime genres is defined in this document
A territory owner will choose a subset of genres from the master TVA list that are available to be attached to stations and podcasts within their territory. You can send station and programme genres to us using the TVA Content Classification Scheme and we will attach it to the item. We will however filter out any genres that are not in the genre list curated by the territory owner.
We also map iTunes categories that are set within an RSS feed to a Radioplayer genre. This was possible in the old system, but was only 1-to-1 - it is possible for an iTunes category to be turned into many Radioplayer genres. It is also possible to add a specific Radioplayer genre to a podcast, rather than inferring the podcast genre from the station it is attached to.