Radio has always been dependent on the studio phone lines to maintain a thin connection and narrow aperture to the outside world.
To the extent that there was a return path, this was it.
Things are better these days with social media allowing for an alternative and richer aperture but nothing beats the warmth and basic human connection of someone’s voice.
Voice has always been radio’s resonance. It creates connection and belonging. It makes radio your companion. You aren’t just part of some anonymous beast — you are a part of the community.
When the voice goes, some of radio’s magic goes.
Our Fabrik media platform allows modern radio to completely transform their intimacy with their audience in the realtime and one of the major uses is to land Voice Notes and media into the studio at scale.
Last night we had a brief outage on one of our Cloud Services and for the modern media platforms using our Fabrik platform; it was the equivalent of the phone lines going down.
Except worse.
The historically thin aperture of the studio lines and its analogue workflow meant that it is used in very specific ways e.g. current affairs shows and competitions.
If the lines went down, you could repair for a little while around it and usually no one would worry.
Modern cloud tools like Fabrik remove these limitations and create a constant stream of interaction in the realtime.
Conversation and engagement is blended into all parts of the broadcast day and it is a rich and broad media mix of text, voice, images and video.
The cloud service glitch last night for that brief period had an immediate dampening effect in our client studios.
It is like the background chatter of the bazaar suddenly going silent. You don’t notice it until it’s not there.
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