Public Radio Exchange

PRX and WBUR partner on local station iPhone app

Jake posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 | Blog

This is going to be a season of exciting announcements for PRX, and here’s another one.

As part of our CPB-funded work to develop innovative applications for public media, we’re partnering with WBUR to develop a local station iPhone app that really pushes the envelope for what’s possible on the device, what users want, and what stations are capable of in the world beyond broadcast.

Our general principles for what this app should showcase are Localism, Journalism, Participation, and Monetization (yes even public radio folks need to figure out how to make money!).

Of course the app should and will make it easy for you to listen to the WBUR stream, get programs on-demand, read the headlines, find out what’s playing. Those are features you’ll find on many other public radio apps – including the Public Radio Player. But we want it to go much further and take advantage both of WBUR’s unique strengths as a local journalistic resource with a large loyal audience, and of the device’s unique properties like geo location, audio/video/image capture, SMS, and – oh yeah – telephony!

Another important thing to point out about this project: PRX plans to offer the resulting code under an open source license to enable other local stations to develop additional apps, and encourage a developer community to help improve and extend the app for subsequent versions.

In the meantime, WBUR is soliciting input on what listeners might want from a WBUR iPhone app, and you can weigh in here.

And yes, we’ll make sure it runs on the iPad…

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