Read about our events, activities and pilots
"MARCONI services will need to work with the long tail of digital content, i.e. very specific content relevant to a relatively small group." Werner Bailer is researcher at JRS and member of MARCONI's project team. In this week's interview, he presents some exciting areas of research and the challenges to solve there.
MARCONI got off with a flying start last year! “During “De Tijdloze”, a radio program by radio station Studio Brussel, a new interactive feature called “NotifyMe”, was tested. Listeners that voted for a song received a push notification when their song was being played. In order to make this happen, VRT Innovation worked together with Pluxbox, which provides VRT’s radio stations with the editorial system of Radiomanager.
By constanly monitoring the playlist, we were able to find out who voted for which song, 10 minutes before it was being played. Afterwards, a push message was sent via the app of Studio Brussel. This way, listeners would not have to miss out on anything and were automatically reminded of when their favorite song was being played.
In total, we sent out 3967 messages to 2354 people.
Some interactions (in Dutch):
On the 9th and 10th of January, the Joanneum Research hosted a meeting with the MARCONI consortium in Graz in order to review the work done so far and plan the upcoming actions. High on the agenda were discussions on use cases and requirements.
Already three different workshops with radio stations have been carried out, which have provided the consortium with an in-depth understanding of the workflows and challenges for radio-makers. Two additional workshops with listeners are taking place this month. During the meeting in Graz, the team discussed in detail the 16 concepts that they identified so far, while prioritising and grouping the different use-cases. This input was brought into a follow-up discussion that dealt with the MARCONI architecture.
The second day of the meeting started off with a review of the prototyping activities done so far (e.g. a “Notify me” trial that involved over 2300 users). Afterwards, further prototyping and piloting activities planned for the next period were discussed in detail. The communication and exploitation plan was reviewed and a storyboard for the first MARCONI video has already been created. Stay tuned for more updates!
On the 26th and 27th of October, the MARCONI team held its very first meeting. This kick-off took place in the Radio House in Leuven, Belgium, a fitting location for a brainstorm on the possibilities of future radio. The two days were filled with discussions and plans for how we would proceed on the various work packages, pilots and our collaboration. On day two, we also paid a visit to the radio museum, where we got the opportunity to look back on the evolution of radio and the importance it gained in everyday life. We are definitely looking forward to the next steps and the value that personalised and integrated radio solutions can bring for both radio maker and listener.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761802
