Apple’s Announcement: What’s in it for You?

[indiekid / Flickr / cc]

Apple made several interesting announcements yesterday during its music event.

Here’s one that we’re particularly looking forward to: iOS 4.1. This update to the relatively new iPhone/iPod operating system releases next week, and we think it will improve the experience of 3G iPhone owners using the Public Radio Player and other apps, too. Simply put, iOS 4.0 does not play well with the older, 3G iPhones. For some people, this means your apps, including the Player, may move more slowly or crash more often.

While one never knows how a software update will work until it’s ‘out in the wild,’ we suspect many 3G owners are looking forward to next week. Public Radio Player users have something to look forward to as well in a couple more weeks: An update to the Player that will enable multitasking on your devices.

The Player: A Star of Foreign Press

Perusing the internet, I recently came across mentions of the Public Radio Player on a few international blogs. Since my Catalan, German and Italian are all a little rusty; I used Google Translate to decipher these foreign perspectives on the iPhone app. (You can grasp the main points of the articles, but it sometimes feels like Google hired Roberto Benigni to do the translations.) No matter the language, we’re delighted that word is spreading overseas about the Player. Are there any ex-pats out there using the Public Radio Player to stay connected? Let us know!

[Jay.Tong / cc / Flickr]

From mossegalapoma.cat (Spain)

Listen to NPR is a great way to see the true American way of life while a cultural and linguistic immersion surveying its contents, often chain, with a focus on news, culture and society. If you are interested try applying Public Radio Player…is a comfortable, lightweight and full of searching and listening stations such programming through an application of the expected half million Download and have already exceeded two million! (via Google Translate)

From iPhone Konig (Germany)

The Public Radio Player 2.1 covers from the size of about 500 radio stations and over 1000 radio broadcasts from the United States. This software receives the user hears a lot of information and the best news of the latest music fan guaranteed hits. (via Google Translate)

From iPhone Land (Italy)

Version 2.1 of Public Radio Player allows you to quickly free more than 500 American radio stations live. (via Google Translate)

Overall, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Find a new favorite on the Public Radio Player

We live in a world of choices: whether you’re browsing grocery store aisles, or deciding what to listen to on your commute home. Sometimes it’s fun to pick out what you like, and sometimes it’s exhausting. We’re here to help. The Public Radio Player has tons of live station streams and on-demand programs for you to choose from. But when you want something new — you just aren’t sure what — we’ve got a list of featured content waiting in the wings. Choose the “Featured” tab from either the Live or the On Demand screens.

Here at Public Radio Exchange, which leads the Player app development, we listen to public radio all day long. And we hear everything: from beloved talk shows like Fresh Air to award-winning documentaries from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, not to mention tons of creative programs from independent producers all across the country. We’ll be rotating fresh finds into the Featured On Demand list, so you can find your new favorite radio show, in a snap.

Newly featured this week:

Hidden Kitchens from The Kitchen Sisters

“Hidden Kitchens, the duPont Award-winning radio series on NPR’s Morning Edition, explores the world of unexpected, below the radar cooking, legendary meals and eating traditions how communities come together through food.”

American RadioWorks from American Public Media

“ARW is public radio’s largest documentary production unit; it creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for public radio and the Internet.”

StoryCorps from Sound Portraits

“StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.”

Survey: Tell us what you REALLY think

The Public Radio Tuner has been around long enough now that many, many iPhone users have had a chance to try it out, and even make it a part of their lives.

That’s just about the right time to ask you to take a survey.

• What kinds of stations do you listen to?
• When do you use the Tuner (exercising? cooking? falling asleep? waking up (we hope)?)
• News or Music or both?
• Live or On Demand or both?
• Chocolate or Vanilla or swirl? (just kidding)

The survey is hosted by NPR. Please give us a few minutes of your time. Not only will it help improve this iPhone app (with version 2.0 due out soon, we promise), it will inform all sorts of public radio mobile efforts, iPhone and otherwise.

Plus, it’s anonymous, so you can tell us what you *really* think.

Take the survey!

Decentralized discussions about public radio and new media

The more stations in the Public Radio Tuner, the better it gets. So we’ve been inviting public radio stations to submit their streams and promote the Tuner. You might understandably think that there’s one central way to do this. But no. Public radio was a decentralized system well before the Internet came around to show us what the word “decentralized” really meant. Of course, the Web has countless sites. But public radio has hundreds – that’s still a lot, given the cost of entry!  Once a non-commercial station gets the required government licenses and gets their transmitter up and running, they can become members of networks like NPR, PRI, and APM in order to purchase programming, while also producing their own work or licensing it from places like PRX.

Public radio is a loose confederation. Ever tried communicating with a loose confederation? Not so easy. That’s why we ask you to directly request your station’s stream. That’s also why we’re getting the message out in every public-radio-related blog and mailing list we can think of.

As the Tuner continues to develop, we also are refining and clarifying the purpose of the collaboration that developed it. A recurring conversation in the public radio system is how stations can work together while retaining their own unique identities. In short, we’re expert experimenters. For the long version, here are some thoughts.

CPB funded this collaboration as an experiment in sharing resources, knowledge, and harnessing a beneficial network effect for each station and the public radio system as a whole. Communication is an important part of this. Our only preset idea about the Tuner is that we want to bring public radio to mobile media listeners while promoting station’s unique identities. So station input will truly help shape future releases of the Tuner (next one scheduled for May 2009), as well as how we guide stations on submitting their streams and information.

The Tuner is not meant to supplant individual stations’ — nor the networks’ — mobile efforts. It will support them. We’ll be sharing code and other materials so public broadcasting entities can make their own versions of the app as well. That said, judging from the enthusiasm of the Tuner’s users — nearly all reviews are 4 or 5 stars since the January release! — there is a lot to be said for giving people one portal-style app with which to explore the system. As a former mobile user researcher, the top request of all I interviewed was ‘give me one place to get everything.’  As of Friday, Public Radio Tuner has had 133,213 downloads – that’s more than 30,000 a week.

Does an individual station get lost in this? Not necessarily. The Tuner retains the last station listened to, so it’s only one tap – the launch of the app – to get to a station. The Favorites and Nearby functions also get people to stations quickly. If we hear that stations want more visibility beyond the branded station pages, there are ways to work that in — for example, by putting logos in the directory list, or letting people set a “home” station that opens automatically when the app is launched. We can be creative in striking a balance between familiarity (show the stations I know and love) and discoverability (give me something new). Maybe we let people shake the iPhone and land on a random station (see the Urban Spoon app for an example). The next release will have a ‘What’s On Now’ program guide. If your station is airing what someone wants to hear at that moment, you might get a new listener.

Other plans for the next release include on-demand content (kind of like podcasts) for station and network programs. We’re also exploring the possibility of some sort of call to donate to individual stations.

No one knows yet if individual station apps can bring more listeners than one consolidated app, or if that’s even the goal. That’s another reason the collaborators embarked on this experiment. There has been talk of creating a template for a single-station app, but that of course depends on available resources and level of interest.

Public radio, as we all know, is a loose confederation. Standards generally don’t emerge on their own. This expresses in the app in differing stream formats, connection times, and even searchable metadata. The Tuner uses what the stations provide. Searching by format will usually get you results… but you won’t get every possible result because the metadata isn’t there. The Tuner is a great exercise for revealing these needs. We can then communicate back to stations on how to address them for an optimal mobile experience.

Again, we encourage everyone – stations as well as anyone using the Tuner -to contribute ideas so we can set this app apart from the other iPhone radio tuners. The content already does that. But so can public-radio-specific features… as can the message that there’s a huge and engaged public radio community working to make the app better with each new release. We’re scanning blogs and mailing lists as best we can, but the surest way to get your ideas heard is to post them at PublicRadioTuner.com. Here’s the link for general feedback and discussion: http://www.publicradiotuner.com/?page_id=165 And watch this blog for updates.

Public Radio on the iPhone – but of course!

The Public Radio Tuner iPhone App Project is a collaborative effort lead by the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) in partnership with National Public Radio (NPR), Public Interactive (PI), American Public Media (APM), and Public Radio International (PRI), with participation from Doc Searls and Project VRM at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, additional stations and producers, and in coordination with Apple’s U.S. Education division. The goal is to create the Public Radio Tuner – an application for the iPhone platform using Apple’s recently released software development kit (SDK) and iTunes App Store distribution service. The application will serve end users by initially offering access to local stations’ internet radio streams. Additional versions will offer program/content guides along with a catalog of on-demand audio content from local, independent, and national content providers. Future functionality will enable direct listener contributions to stations and content providers. The project will establish a coordinated approach to the iPhone as a powerful platform for public media, setting standards and shared resources for further application development.

Read the Current article about the project.