We currently have over 50,000 recipients in our Play MPE® system, with many of them being key decision makers at radio and we’ve come to realize that sixteen years later, there is still a strong demand from their listeners who expect to be able to access their local radio station signal through the internet. Clipstream(r) Radio is a broadcast solution that enables commercial radio stations to simply and inexpensively webcast their signals.

Competitors in the space promise ad revenue from internet radio, but the reality is that for most stations, providing internet radio is a pure cost center, because the number of listeners is so much smaller than terrestrial radio. Prices are high and offerings are labor intensive as the signal has to be either repeated to an ISP from the station or broadcast directly from the station in various transcoded formats to support various computers and mobile devices. Typically, the number of simultaneous listeners is restricted to a maximum both by licensing and hardware and bandwidth limits and it is common for the services to go out. The quality of the signal is often quite low.

By contrast, our new offering will provide broadcast quality audio to an unlimited number of listeners. Rather than use new media companies to facilitate the broadcast, stations will be able to use our broadcast software from any PC in the office to get a single high quality stream to our servers. Using unused Play MPE® bandwidth we are already paying for, we will replicate a signal which will be accessed without installing software by clicking a play button on the stations’ website.

Because the whole system is automated, we can offer it at a much lower monthly fee than our labor intensive competitors while still keeping margins high. Because the stream runs through our servers, it opens up two derivative businesses. We are already providing Shazaam-style fingerprinting data to our reporting industry partners when music goes out. They have servers running in cities around the country listening to radio, using the fingerprints to identify which song is playing. Because the internet radio streams will be flowing through our servers, we can capture this information in a single city at much lower cost and sell the data back to our partners.

The second business is archiving the audio. Radio stations need to keep their audio for a period of time in case someone says something profane on air against a regulation and for advertisers to audit their commercial run times. Since all of the audio is running through our servers, we will be able to spool it to storage and offer a paid website form where either the station or someone in the public can enter a start and stop time and date and the server will automatically email them that clip as an audio file. By contrast, many stations still use archaic techniques such as logging the signal to six hour VCR tapes and manually searching for archived content when needed.