AirKast Goes Beyond Streaming to Enrich the Mobile Radio Experience

At the recent NAB Radio Show in Washington, D.C., broadcasters, developers and vendors alike harped on the mobile mind-set change that must occur for effective strategic practices to take hold. The fundamental message: “Having an online stream and building a mobile app do not a digital strategy make.”

AirKast, a Cupertino, California-based mobile app developer and content provisioner for more than 900 radio broadcasters, as well as selected content providers (ESPN, DirecTV), designs applications to transcend the shoveling of on-air feeds from terrestrial airwaves to mobile devices. Shawn Sires, AirKast’s VP of media services and a featured panelist at NAB, told BIA/Kelsey that his company’s richer goal for broadcasters is to produce “interactive mobile user experiences.”

This suite of experiences begins with mobile tuning, but then allows listeners to actively engage the station’s full brand as they are consuming its product. Users can view associated video, call up full lyrics and view album art — all as a song streams. AirKast also customizes station playlists sorted by category (most played, artist, etc.) to enable users to sample the station, then buy songs directly. It uses metadata appended to radio streams to “trigger the interactive events.”

TuneKast is AirKast’s mobile application template that aggregates a station’s content together in a centralized place for distribution across all major operating systems (iPhone and BlackBerry, with Android under construction). Rich media ads — both from the local customer and third-party networks — can be served up within the apps in a variety of formats. Geolocation services are also layered on top. These tools give advertisers the ability to target in multiple ways and change campaigns in real time. 

Granted, terrestrial broadcasters still trail pure-play online streaming leaders like Pandora in the race to capture mobile music mind share, namely because Pandora allows its users to personalize their own stations and time shift content. However, AirKast’s customized user experiences and rich ad targeting add robustness to local mobile radio to at least position terrestrial broadcasters as a viable option.

AirKast’s current emphasis on mobile is as much a byproduct of marketplace movement as anything else. However, Sires sees greenfield beyond mobile, stressing that the company envisions content relationships springing up on a number of new devices and fashions itself as a “content provider for these content producers so the content can live appropriately on these devices.” Next up may well be IP-connected TVs, where Pandora has already made significant inroads into the living room.