The Business Speakers Radio Network is having a Makeover! Or at least that’s what it looks like on the surface as the new website is getting built with new shows, new content, new hosts, and new news services getting installed over the next few weeks. But is there more going on than meets the eye?

Technology has helped the network evolve many times over the 9 years the station has been on air. From Blog Talk Radio to now, BSRN has hosted hundreds of experts talking about their expertise and issues that are important to them, and we’ve been doing it with eyes to the future at every step. Recently we started having real issues with our streaming provider that we simply couldn’t ignore anymore.

You see Spacial.com is the front runner internationally for online and terrestrial radio stations in providing the digital platform for building and delivering your station programming – laying out what plays when, and in what order. Our problem is that at its core, the platform is broken and has been all this time.

While it automates a lot of the heavy lifting that radio needs to get the tracks on air that you want to listen to, the problem comes in that there is a bug somewhere in the code that every once in a while pops up and it starts shuffling your content’s order within your playlists. Forgive me if this starts sounding a bit technical, and I’m trying to keep it as non-technical as I can. What it means is that when you build a list of what’s supposed to happen when, it tends to ignore that order of operations and plays it in whatever order it feels like, which can seriously screw with your content.

Normally the way a live station handles it is that the live DJ says what to play when and it’s not a problem, or on a prerecorded sequence, the General Manager is listening and can kill the current track and swap in the right track within a minute or so of it starting to go wrong.

For stations like ours, however, where we prerecord almost everything and manage the station once a week, that shuffling bug simply isn’t working in our favor. In order to deal with the issue and preclude it from really having much of an impact, it means we need to more or less eliminate the risk of shuffling content by hard composing our content into hour-long files and only sequencing complete hour-long shows so there’s no room for the automation to make a mistake… or to help make the content more dynamic either. Plus it’s a Titanic pain in the butt.

Meanwhile new opportunities to take our videos and audios of our recorded shows and get them great traffic by putting them on high traffic sites like YouTube and podcast streaming and sharing platforms are growing almost exponentially, including a variety of platforms that are now offering video and audio hosting on Lifetime Deals. Taking that next step to take those files and schedule them into platforms like Roku or other internet TV-based applications now opens up whole new opportunities that offer us much more control over how our output is delivered. So while we kick the tires of some new platforms and explore our options for what we do next with BSRN, we’re taking the opportunity to move our entire library of current and new shows to our BSRN YouTube Channel and start testing out syndications to other platforms.

So while we’re getting a virtual makeover, we’re really making a LOT of changes under the hood as well.