A Radio Station with Sub Regions and Thin Studios

USE CASE

A media company has a few geographically separated FM licenses and they want to build networked radio operations that provide combined programming consisting of main channel with some localized programmes and advertising. The company wants to have flexible production process so that programming, media production and On-Air operations can be done anywhere. Complex studios and separate studio distribution hardware are to be avoided. The media company produces also newspapers both in physical and digital domain and wants to integrate and benefit from the editorial work in multiple platforms.

THE SOLUTION

The system is built with RadioMan services in AWS Cloud. All the user-interfaces are browser-based and can be located anywhere. Audio contribution to the system can be established directly from the browser via WebRtc and for other contributions various codec streams like RTP, SRT etc can be used.

The FM distribution is done by a separate tower company but it could be done also with separate transmitter sites. Simultaneously the programmes are streamed as a web service.

The system database is configured with multi-channel mode to support main/subchannel configuration. This configuration allows station schedules to be integrated so that the subchannels can be planned independently containing loaned live programme blocks from the main channel. RadioMan Back-end services include Media Asset Management, long term planning, Music Selection and Programme Planning. Back-end services include also file transcoding, normalization, legal logging and media publishing services.

Each Programme Channel has a cloud-based RadioMan MediaNode that takes care of On-Air playout, audio routing and mixing. The Media Nodes are nested for contribution and distribution purposes. Media Nodes generate the SRT audio streams to the FM transmission as well as to the Web Streaming services. The web streaming in this occasion is managed by a streaming server in the cloud but it can be also a 3rd party service.

All the planning and media operations including On-Air activities can be done anywhere. This allows the media company to run also the regional channels in most efficient way so that part of the time the regional channels follow the main channel, part of the day they are run from the central locations and then they have some timeslots run locally from the region.

The studio instances in this configuration are kept light with RodeCaster PRO USB audio mixers for microphones and telephone/Conference APP interfaces. Audio feed from the studio sets to the Cloud is via WebRTC. This configuration allows also remote contribution via browser user interface and RadioMan LIVE Contribution anywhere. Advertising is interfaced from an external traffic system and can run local / regional ad blocks simultanously. Audio clips, programme recordings and partial clippings can be sent to the media company digital media publishing environment via the Media Publish API of the system. Media publishing of programmes can be specified to be automatic already at the long-term template stage.