Broadcast systems
A station’s website should know whether the station is on air. Most do not.
What this is
Live audio, and everything around it.
Broadcast sites are usually built as brochures with a play button bolted on. The schedule is a JPEG, the presenters are a page nobody updates, and the player is an embed pointing at a stream URL that changes without warning. Meanwhile the station has a real-time state, who is on air, what is playing, whether the signal is up, that the website could be reading and does not.
We build the site as part of the transmission. On-air state and now-playing come from the broadcast itself, proxied through the site so listeners never hit the streaming origin directly and the station is not exposed to whatever load a viral moment brings. Shows and presenters are records, so the schedule, the archive and the "who is on now" strip are all the same data rather than three things to update.
The rest is weight. Radio audiences are mobile and often on constrained data, and a station homepage that ships a multi-megabyte background video before the play button works is a station losing listeners at the door.
What’s involved
- Stream integration
- Player, status and metadata, proxied so the origin is never hit directly by browsers and can be changed without a redeploy.
- Schedules and on-air state
- Shows and slots as data, so the site can answer "what is on now" without anybody editing it.
- Presenters and shows
- Real records with their own pages, the archive a station accumulates and usually cannot search.
- Listener surfaces
- Player behaviour across mobile and desktop, including what happens when the signal drops.
How it usually goes
- 01Read the signal chain
- What the stream actually exposes, and how reliably.
- 02Model the schedule
- Shows, slots, presenters, and the rules for what counts as on air.
- 03Build the site around it
- Pages that derive from that state instead of duplicating it.
- 04Hand the schedule to the station
- They update it. Not us, not a developer.
What we won’t do
- We will not ship a homepage that autoplays heavy media on mobile data.
- We will not fake on-air state. If the signal cannot be read, the site says it cannot be read.
Where we’ve done it
- Khendo FM
A radio station whose website is part of the transmission rather than a poster for it.
Next
If this is the shape of your problem, describe the part that breaks if it isn’t right.
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