I’ve always wanted my own, live radio show, but creating such a broadcast has typically involved lots of equipment, technical staff and coordination between the two. Now it’s easier than ever with a new app called Spreaker, which allows you to broadcast high quality audio over the Internet with nothing more than the microphone on your iPhone.
“What we do is we help people to create their own audio content,” explains Francesco Bashieri, Co-founder and CEO of Spreaker, “their own radio show or their own podcast, broadcast it live to their social networks and actually monetize that content.”
While there are other companies that provide technology that enables live broadcasting, Bashieri believes that Spreaker has a competitive advantage.
“We compete on the quality of the broadcast—much better quality—and on the ease of use…” says Brashieri. “It has to do with the infrastructure and the backbone. We actually chose to stream on 128 kilobits stereo, and it’s somehow more resource intensive, but we think that the quality in this kind of application is very important. Other guys are doing 32 kilobits, and you can feel it. It’s like listening on the phone.”
Spreaker offers both streaming and pre-recorded capabilities. With live streaming, the audience can interact with you and each other as the broadcast is taking place. They can post questions and get answers in real-time.
You can embed the Spreaker player on any third party web site and customize it, similar to YouTube. You also have the ability to download broadcasts as MP3 files, and use iTunes-compatible RSS feeds to syndicate the content pretty much anywhere. Spreaker is available as both a free service with ads and a premium service, which eliminates ads, while providing more storage and bandwidth.
“What we figured out is that the podcasting ecosystem is currently flawed,” explains Bashieri, “because it’s very difficult. People have to source all their tools from different parts and somehow stitch them together. They need to deal with technology, they need to deal with hosting and bandwidth, [and] they need to do promotion. They have no idea how to monetize this, and this is what we are all about. We want to help those people.”
More info:
Spreaker web site: http://www.spreaker.com/
Spreaker blog: http://blog.spreaker.com/
Spreaker profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spreaker
Spreaker profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spreaker
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