Irish Alternative Radio

I have prototyped a web application, particularly suited to smartphone and designed for smart speaker skill integration. The smart speaker skill development is outside the scope of this assignment, but the foundations of skills for Google Home, Amazon Alexa and by extension Apple HomePod, Sonos or other smart speakers. Amazon Alexa is the most openly developed for, the others have varying levels of closed systems. The product aggregates simulcast audio streams from Irish radio stations, and switches between streams based on user-indicated preferences for genres.

This product offers a bespoke, user-tailored audio feed of live, human-made FM and digital radio. You can listen through the mobile application, mobile website or desktop and you can also listen across smart devices in the home or while travelling. Irish Alternative Radio is the first player in Ireland to champion the excellent and overlooked niche and specialist radio shows made each week by staff and volunteers of state, commercial, local, community and digital stations. It is designed to run in the background and keep the listener company, but do so with local presenters, producers, content, news, artists and musicians. The schedule is “set it and forget” unless users want to make changes to their stream feed.

The user will primarily interact with a table of shows in their schedule, voice command and audio output.

The primary function of the app is to play a continuous online stream of Irish-produced audio, tailored to the user. There is an initial setup with basic data and genre choces. On a granular level, users can mute shows and stations, star favourite shows, share shows and schedules and email the stations or presenters through their schedule page on the app. In addition if metadata is available from the station, the user can ask the smart speaker what song is currently playing, ask Irish alternative radio to mute a show or star a show. In addition, users can receive a smartphone, desktop or smart speaker notification that a starred show is about to come on air.

The application needs continuous internet connectivity to run. Bandwidth requirements are not a high as video streaming. Radio stations offer their streams at bitrates ranging from 96 to 320kbps, already allowing for users listening in areas with poorer internet coverage or those in transit. The user databases are hosted on cloud servers. To listen online, or on a smart speaker the application needs to fetch user data in the form of schedule, current show and streaming url. In the case that there is no live show being broadcast that matches the user preferences for genre, there is a fallback list of RSS feeds in the database of previously cloud/podcasted shows in the user’s preferred genres that will be fetched and streamed until the next live show meeting the user criteria airs. In addition to this, there may be metadata embedded in each audio stream, but this is dependent on the encoding at each creator site.

This product requires a multipurpose computer (Rowland et al. 30) as opposed to a smart device or sensor in order to operate. In the first instance, this would be a smartphone, but could also be a desktop, laptop, tablet or smart speaker. Each device needs to be connected to the internet and have a speaker or headphone output. In the case of the smart speaker, this also needs be conncted to the internet so that the “proprietary protocols of the OT network to the IT network” (Sinclair) can function, be this an Amazon Alexa Skill or Apple Homepod App.

As mentioned above, the product can be connected into an ecosystem using a skill or application. The product can also be cast via Bluetooth onto any compatible device, or plugged physically into a speaker. Each show or schedule is sharable on social media also.

Irish Alternative Radio Application