About the Project

The Public Radio Player iPhone App Project is a collaborative effort led by 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 the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, additional stations and producers, and coordination with Apple’s U.S. Education division.

The project’s goal is to establish a coordinated approach to the iPhone as a powerful platform for public media, setting standards and shared resources for further application development. These efforts center on design and development of the Public Radio Player — an application for the iPhone platform using Apple’s software development kit (SDK) and the iTunes App Store distribution service. The Player is bringing public radio to mobile media listeners while promoting station’s unique identities. In doing so, the project is gathering insights about the mobile experience of public radio that it is sharing with the public radio system.

CPB and the collaborators see this project as a way to encourage communication and knowledge sharing in order to harness the collective expertise, talents, and resources of the public radio system.

The project guidelines specified certain features, including:

  • Access to local stations’ internet radio streams
  • Station program schedules when available
  • On-demand program episodes from local, independent, and national content providers

For more project background, read the article in Current.

Timeline

November 2008
Project begins

December
American Public Media releases Public Radio Tuner 1.0; shares code with collaboration

January 2009
Collaboration updates Public Radio Tuner to 1.1; update goes live on iTunes

February
Tuner is #1 free app in all of iTunes

March
One million downloads

April
1.5 million downloads

July
Public Radio Player 2.0 goes live in iTunes with 300+ live streams and 800+ programs on demand

F.A.Q.

What does “public radio” mean?

“Public radio” refers to hundreds of non-commercial radio stations and program producers in the United States. Many of these local stations carry programs you may listen to, like Morning Edition, Car Talk, A Prairie Home Companion, and This American Life. Local stations decide which programs they air, giving each station its own unique sound. Familiar names like NPR, American Public Media, and Public Radio International are organizations that produce many of the radio programs you hear, but they don’t actually have radio stations to play them on. That’s where your local station comes in. So what you hear throughout the day probably comes from a variety of sources around the country. A large portion of public radio stations focus on news and talk shows, but there are many out there playing great music all day long – everything from jazz and blues to underground rock. You can view a list of stations currently on the Player. When you download the Public Radio Player, we encourage you to try out some stations you’ve never heard before. You’ll like what you hear!

Why an iPhone app?

With an iPhone app, we want to reach public radio listeners wherever they are, not just when they’re next to a computer or a radio. When Apple opened their iPhone software development kit (SDK), we thought the iPhone would be a great place to start experimenting with mobile streaming. Knowing we could reach a huge audience via the iTunes App Store moved us even more in the iPhone direction. We hope this project will allow public radio, as a whole, to take advantage of this rapidly evolving platform. One outcome of the Public Radio Player is a set of code and best practices that can serve as a guide to stations and public radio organizations who want to build their own mobile applications.

With nearly 2 million downloads and counting, the Public Radio Player has made public radio stations, and the content they broadcast, more visible to a wider public. That’s been the goal all along. Many iTunes users have yet to experience public radio, so we figured we should be where they are rather than wait for them to come to us. If you haven’t yet had the chance, download the free app now.

Who’s working on this?

As mentioned before, what you think of as “public radio” is a loose but wide-ranging assortment of hundreds of radio stations and program producers across the country and the world. What’s exciting about the Public Radio Player project is that it has brought together talent and resources from a number of camps. Public Radio Exchange is leading a collaboration of National Public Radio, Public Interactive, American Public Media and Public Radio International, which all produce and/or distribute radio programs to local stations. The app might fit in the palm of your hand, but don’t let that fool you: Bringing together hundreds of station streams, schedules, and podcasts is a massive undertaking. Collaboration among these national networks enables the pooling of resources and helps us get the word out to *all* eligible stations to invite them to participate. In addition, this collaboration will be sharing the code and the aggregated stream data. We hope the Public Radio Player project can serve as a model for further collaborations within the public radio industry.

Where’s the money coming from?

The development of the Public Radio Player iPhone application was made possible by a generous grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Their funding has allowed us to take the app from American Public Media’s original version 1.0 all the way to the Public Radio Player 2.0 that’s available in iTunes today.

I have more questions.
As the project has progressed, we’ve used the blog to address common questions about the app and the project behind it. Some particularly helpful posts:

We encourage you to look through these, and if you still have questions, ask us in the Get Satisfaction window below.

One Comment on “About the Project”

  1. 1 Public Radio Tuner » Blog Archive » Public Radio Tuner version 1.1 now live! said at 11:21 am on January 6th, 2009:

    [...] About the Project [...]