Case Studies

Radio Lollipop have been brightening the days of sick kiddies since for the past two decades. The Planetwide Radio Company worked hard with Radio Lollipop to provide an audio distribution system to allow their stations around the world to continue the good work

 

Case 2 - Radio Lollipop
 

Radio Lollipop is a children's charity radio station that provides entertaining and informative radio for paediatric  hospitals around  the world. When Radio Lollipop approached us, it was not for a traditional streaming media solution but rather for an innovative, cost effective solution that would enable their stations from around the world to take a 'sustaining service' that would run 24/7 and provide a high quality alternative to local programming.
 

We quickly realised that this was in fact two problems. Firstly, we needed to provide them with a means of generating the program content in the first place, and once generated, work out the best way to distribute the content to the hospitals around the world that take the service.
 

Radio Lollipop have been brightening the days of sick children for the past two decades. The Planetwide Radio Company worked hard with Radio Lollipop to provide an audio distribution system to allow their stations around the world to continue the good work.
View Radio Lollipop Case Study>
 
In order to tackle this problem, we worked closely with a company called P Squared Ltd which provides broadcast 'playout' software to the UK and European radio industries. Part of their expertise is in providing equipment for semi or fully automated radio which allows you to produce a live sounding radio station with a minimal amount of human input. The customer really wanted the 'playout' system to be located at our data centre and for the overall hardware to be managed by us but with day to day running of the station and the content for the station, managed by them remotely. P Squared's Myriad playout system made this possible.
 
 
Once the content for the station was covered, we turned our attention to how we could distribute the audio around the World. In the end, we decided that the audio would be processed and encoded (on site) at 96 KBits/second using Window Media Encoder. This would then feed to one of our Media Server Clusters for distribution.
 
The final twist in the story was when we were asked whether there would be any way of the end stations picking up the stream without using a PC as this was seen to add to the complication. The solution was to use Audiotrons provided by Turtle Beach. These internet tuners look and act like Hi-Fi radio tuners but actually 'tune' to internet stations  via a broadband connection. The Audiotron's provided a simple to understand and use platform for receiving the Lollipop service with adding an additional PC to each station (it was cheaper too!).
 
The final solution has been in operation since early 2003 and provides a private 'sustaining' service for children's hospitals in as diverse places as Uruguay and Australia. For more details on the great work that Radio Lollipop do, visit the Radio Lollipop website