Spinitron offers a Webcast Archive service named Spinitron Ark.
See it in action at WZBC 90.3 FM Newton – Boston College Radio, Chestnut Hill, MA navigate to any past playlist and look for the player. Other stations currently testing should feel free to invite you to check out theirs.
Description of the service
The Ark system consists of these parts
- Recorder connects to a stream and makes audio data files
- Storage for two weeks worth of audio data per stream
- Server gives access to the audio data over the internet
- Player runs in a listeners web browser, fetches and plays the audio from the server
We offer the recorder, storage and server as a subscription service for a monthly fee (pricing below). We integrate a web player into Spinitron public pages on spinitron.com for clients that subscribe to both Ark and Spinitron playlist management service. We also provide a web player widget that any Ark subscriber can integrate in their web pages.
Listeners can start the archive player at any point in time within the last two
weeks that the webmaster provides.
Public pages on spinitron.com will provide a variety of start buttons,
see below for details.
Ark subscribers have access certain management tools including
- Display of recent and historical audience size
- Log of each listener’s use to the service including the listener connection timestamp, archive start point, and approx. geographic location.
- SoundExchange formatted reports of use will be available for clients subscribed to both Ark and Spinitron playlist management service (not implemented yet)
Billing and pricing
For a fixed monthly fee of your choice you receive a nominal monthly data transfer allocation. No down payment. No commitment.
We quote the data transfer allocation in terms of listener hours. When a listener connects to your archive and listens for one hour, one listener hour of your allocation is consumed. (This is the same kind of thing as Aggregate Tuning Hours [ATH] used in the Reports of Use and Statements of Account for your live webcast.)
| Monthly fee | Monthly listener hours |
|---|---|
| $20 | 2,250 |
| $40 | 4,500 |
| $80 | 9,000 |
| $120 | 13,500 |
| $160 | 18,000 |
| $200 | 22,500 |
For example, for $40 a month you get 4,500 listener hours a month. If 45 people each listen for 100 hours during the month, that would consume the whole allocation. So would 500 people who each listen for 9 hours.
Overage
Since you may not have a good idea of your archive’s listenership, we allow you to consume more than your monthly allocation so long as you step up to a higher tier in subsequent months. We won’t cut off service once your month’s allocation is exhausted, instead we will notify you and ask what you want to do going forwards.
How to choose your tier
If you know anything about prior archive audience size then we can factor that in. Otherwise we’ll basically use trial and error: we’ll agree an initial estimate, choose a tier, monitor usage to see what happens and, if necessary, choose a different tier next month. Our overage policy supports this process.
Your live webcast’s monthly ATH might be useful for the initial estimate. For example, if your monthly webcast ATH is around 10,000 and you have a 128 kbps stream then the $80/mo tier allows nearly as much listening to the archive.
Project status
As of Mid November we are able to offer the service commercially.
Limited function on mobile. On a mobile device the archive playback will stop a short time up to 5 minutes after the device’s screen turns off or the web browser tab with the player is backgrounded. This can be acceptable in some use cases, e.g. I have a cheap tablet at home for this kind of use. But it it means you can’t continuously listen to the archive while doing something else with a phone or if its screen is off/locked (e.g. when it’s in a pocket or bag).
There’s a widget web player that you can use on your web site. Indeed anyone can use it on their web site. It’s the same as what we use on spinitron.com. It allows the web master to
set arbitrary start points for archive playback so you can put
play buttons on web pages that start the player at any dates and times. We will use it on spinitron.com to put play buttons on public pages as described
below.
For now we are accepting only existing Spinitron clients as Ark customers in order to limit how quickly we need to scale up the system.
Copyright, licensing and SoundExchange
We operate the Ark service on condition that it is part of your webcast service that you operate under the statutory license. You assume liability for your archive’s compliance with law, regulations and procedures with copyright performance royalty organizations.
Listeners’ use of the archive counts towards your webcast’s audience just like the live webcast. Thus the Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH) of your webcast service for any given period is the sum of the ATH of live listening and that of archive playback.
The consequences depend on the rates and terms your webcast operates under: Public Radio (CPB/NFCB), Educational, or CRB.
- Educational and CRB webcasters must limit their monthly ATH to 159,140 to qualify as Minimum-Fee Webcasters.
- Educational webcasters must limit their monthly ATH to 80,000 to qualify for the reporting waiver.
- Statements of Account (monthly for CRB, annual for Educational) include statements of your monthly ATH.
- You must include the songs Ark users listen to in the Reports of Use you send to SoundExchange (CRB and Educational services without a reporting waiver).
- CPB/NFCB webcasters that report to NPR must process the archive server connection logs into NPR format and merge them with the live webcast streaming logs.
Ark users can use the management tools to obtain listener hours for their archive for arbitrary date ranges and listener logs. Clients of both Ark and Spinitron playlist management can also use Spinitron to prepare SoundExchange Reports of Use and NPR-format streaming log files of archive use.
Legal
See the Ark Terms of Service.
. Its position on the web page tells the user what to expect. If it is at the top of a playlist, as it is now, the playlist date/time indicates the historical moment where playback begins. Or it could be on each line in a list of past playlists. Or in several places in a calendar view, allowing playback according to time-slot. Or even beside each song in a playlist, although this might be legally dubious.
