Two Innovative Projects To Make Radio More Interactive

Floris Daelemans from VRT introduced delegates to two innovative research projects at the Belgium broadcaster: Marconi and HRadio.

Marconi’s aim is to make radio fully interactive and personalised, integrating all social media platforms into live views for the studio. The platform also encourages interactive engagement with listeners through polls and specific targeting, based on location and other metrics. Privacy is of course very important, through partnering with Pluxbox, Marconi uses a system called PriVaults to lock down personal data.

HRadio is a hybrid radio project which merges broadcast and internet technologies. The project uses RadioDNS which acts as a lookup for radio station metadata. From this it has access to RadioVis, providing live slideshow like images and RadioEPG which provides schedule information, along with on demand programmes. The project is also exploring the possibility of receiving DAB signals directly over the internet.

Both these projects integrate together and are designed to make radio better and bring the benefits of the internet to live radio.