 Thank you very much indeed, Will and thanks for attending. I'll try and keep this short because I know there's a few things that are worse than keeping people from lunch. But I'm really going to talk about a site that's really a website that we set up about five months ago now. But I just want to start off with a story. I had a haircut the other day and people might think that's a strange thing for a balling middle-aged person. I probably got ripped off. But the purpose of mentioning that is that in the background they were playing music as you hear in quite a lot of retail outlets these days. But the thing was different was that they were actually promoting their own business. Okay, so they'd play music and then they'd say this business is do this, do that, blah, blah. Until a couple of years ago we had an independent grocery store near us. It was taken over by one of the major groups. And whenever I go in there now I hear Coles Radio. They're actually broadcasting that on digital radio. So it's a brand, if you like, using the medium of radio to get their own message across. Unfiltered. It's not advertising. The whole thing is their content. The reason I'm telling you the story is that, and I don't know how many of you got to Tony's talk yesterday, but he made the point and I think he's absolutely right that audio is coming into its own on the internet. And my background is in recent years as a volunteer was with a Canberra community radio station. How many people here listen to community radio? I could ask. A few, okay. How many of you are actually presented or been involved in some way? That's good, okay. Thank you. Community radio is going for about 50 years and it's different from commercial radio. There are restrictions on the amount of sponsorship you can have and you really do have to fairly well define the purpose for which you're broadcasting. I'll talk later about why we decided to go with webcasting rather than with traditional broadcasting. So why webcast? I'm going to talk about creating content. I totally covered that fairly well yesterday, I thought. So I won't go into that in huge detail, although there are a few little differences. I particularly want to focus today on using other people's material because it's a very, for radio it's a big deal. I'll talk about the technicalities of getting a stream onto the internet, how you can then present your content using WordPress and the final one, which is the big one, is how to get people to listen to them and give them a reason for doing so. Okay, very briefly, my career began as a newspaper journalist. I've had two scents of that. I created my first web page in the early 1990s and that was all hand-coded. I was crying out back in, and I was working for government at the time. We were crying out for something like WordPress, but there were no condemnation systems available at that time. So I've been using WordPress as my CMS of choice for about 12 years. Most of my work has been for nonprofits. There is some federal government use of WordPress, but not a huge amount. As I mentioned, I've been in community radio for about 10 years and I worked with my wife, Barbie, as a volunteer. We produced a lot of arts material. We set up Living Arts for a variety of reasons, which I won't go into here. We decided to basically pull back from the station that we'd been involved with. We set up Living Arts Canberra in July. Now, the difference between our site and our enterprise, if you like, and most conventional radio websites is that we're primarily a website with audio content, rather than being a radio station with a website attached. And there's this important distinction, I think. So we're using webcasts to promote website content rather than the other way around. That's our rationale to provide local arts, music and community sector with an outlet that they don't have. And we're now moving into areas such as schools. We've just done the first of a series of, or first pilot, with some children from the school that my grandchildren attend, where the teachers actually got them to write a radio script. And we've recorded that and we've let it play that back in an assembly. And what we're trying to do there is teach kids about how to gather information, how to do research, how to do it ethically and how to present it. And it's been a very valuable exercise, I think. So our particular focus is the arts, but we look into the future as well. The site, which I'll have a live demonstration of shortly, I hope, before it goes well, is... We chose a quite a feminine theme and the reason for that is that the majority of people in the arts that I'm aware of are women. So it is directed, not only women, of course, but it is particularly to serve the arts community. At this stage, it's mostly interviews, but interspersed with music. The music is essential in any radio station. I don't know of any station that broadcasts 24 hours a day and that's basically the expectation now where they don't interspers, where they don't have music. It's extremely difficult to produce enough interesting talk content 24 hours a day. I'm going to make some... Just briefly go through some of the terminology because it is a bit confusing. I'm using... When I say podcasting, I'm talking about on-demand audio, where users can select the content and the time at which they listen to it. Whereas webcasting is a continuous stream. Users don't have any control over the sequence. That's an important distinction at least as far as music licensing is concerned because they are distinct sets of licenses. If you're going to set up an internet streaming service, you need to be conscious of this and conscious of the fact that if you're going to do both and you're going to have copyright music, then you need separate licenses. There are things like Periscope now. There's a reference which I'll give you at the end of this talk where you can... Which are kind of pop-up broadcasting, if you like. You're not webcasting continuously, but for special occasions, you can put that content up. Essentially, we do webcasting and podcasting. I put that in inverted columns because it's not quite the same as some of the podcasts you might listen to where there's music and stuff. We deliberately avoid putting copyright music into our podcasts, basically for licensing reasons. These are some of the reasons that we decided to go with webcasting rather than with trying to set up, trying to duplicate, have another radio station. It is actually very difficult to go along and say, I want to set up a broadcast station. There are huge costs involved. There's a big process involved. You'll see there, the station we came from had an annual budget, I think, of close to $300,000 a year. A large proportion of that is licensing fees and it's also electricity. You're pumping out 20... A lot of power. It costs a lot of money. The advantage of webcasting is you don't actually need a licence to do webcasts per se, or what you do to play copyright music. It's basically unlimited. You really just need a reliable internet connection and most people have that today. Most people have download limits which are perfectly adequate for receiving or even for putting a single up there. You've got theoretically worldwide coverage which is both a benefit and a blessing, both a blessing and a curse, I guess. We are deliberately quite local, although we do cover people who have been performing in Canberra or coming to Canberra and sometimes we cover international people as well. The biggest issue with webcasting, frankly, is getting people to listen. We say to them, we've set up an internet radio station. My first question is, I want frequencies at all. It doesn't work like that. Yes. Okay. I was talking about music and I'll go to a live demonstration shortly, but here are some statistics that I got from the International Federation of Phonographic Industry. That's the peak body, if you like, for music publishers throughout the world. I found these figures very interesting that people do listen to a lot of music. Not surprisingly, being on the road is the most popular listening location. 86% of us listen to music through online streaming. I found that figure quite, I was quite amazed when I saw that actually. But interestingly, nearly half of that comes through YouTube. I figure. But what I was saying before about being local, local genres tend to be the most popular. So what we do is we use WordPress for a number of things on the site. I'll go to a live demonstration shortly. We provide a service event calendar where people can put up their events and we will follow up, we'll often follow up those with interviews and previews and reviews. We use it to display program schedules. I'll give you a short demo of that shortly. We use it to present the content through an HTML5 player. Now, anyone else had an experience with HTML5? How did you find it? It's done a lot of work on this and it's the one, I'm a great believer in standards and it's the one thing that seems to work with Apple. It's just about every platform. It works with Apple, it works with Android, it works with most browsers. But you do have, there are a limited number of plugins that can handle streaming audio as opposed to just as opposed to MP3s on your site. We also use it to create playlists of current and archived interviews as podcasts. Keeping your site up to date is important but for us it was important also to have an archive so that people could go back to interviews we've done in the past and we have quite a big demand for that. Creating content, I won't say it's easy but it's not very difficult and Tony went into some detail about that yesterday and I would agree with everything he said. You basically just need a good microphone, audio editing software and in the case of webcasting a way to encode your audio that is to put it in a form where it can be streamed. In reality as I said you need music and it needs to be in a digitised form. Probably MP3 is still the most widely used standard and some providers require you to have MP3. People expect a radio station whether it's webcasting or traditional broadcasting to be only 247. That doesn't mean you have to spend 24 hours a day creating new content. I don't know if any of you listen to Radio National but they are almost now notorious for repeating stuff and there's nothing wrong with that because people listen at different times of the day. So if you're going to set up a stream, make sure that there's enough new content to keep people coming back but that you're not making a rod of your own back. We do a lot of recording via Skype. That's my wife sitting at our home studio. Things I point out. There's a mixer on the right and on the screen we use an audio program called Hindenburg. There are alternatives available. Skype recording can be tricky. They change the API a while back and it's a little more difficult for some audio programs to capture. We do a lot of interviews via Skype and it's again much more cost effective way than trying to set up a traditional analog to phone, sorry, digital analog phone box. There are advantages and disadvantages in doing live or pre-recording programs. Most of our stuff is pre-recorded but whichever way you do it, this is substantial time commitment. Live radio has the advantage of immediacy, I guess. It's more immediate and you don't have to edit it. But there are huge in broadcasting at least where there's a lot of regulation. There are risks in doing live broadcasting, live interviews with people you don't know. That's why commercial stations have seven second delays so that if people start going off track, should we say that they can kill it? We tend to pre-record stuff because it means you can get a much more polished product. It's also easier with a lot of reviewers who are nervous. You can then sort of come and place it together and it sounds much better. Keeping a station on air 24 hours a day is a real challenge. Most hosted streaming providers will give you the option of what they call an auto DJ service where you can upload files, go into a scheduler and schedule your interviews on your music and do whatever you want. The important thing here is it's an important distinction between sites like Facebook even and SoundCloud. Once you upload to a site like that, you lose control of your content potentially. If you're uploading third party music, that is an absolute no. You can't give away other people's intellectual property. So if you do find a stream provider, make sure that you are actually buying the service and it's understood that you still have control of the content. Your stream needs to be encoded. So it comes out of your computer. There are basically three encoders available. I've not found any better plugins to word press yet, but if anyone knows of any, I'd be pleased to hear about it. As I say, you can get an audio stream provider. We use a commercial provider. There are some in Australia. There are quite a lot overseas. Or if you're really keen, you can set up your own shout cast or ice cast server. They're both freely available. You need to decide on what bit rate you're going to use. We use 64-bit stereo at 4100 kilohertz. We find that's a good balance between quality and cost because the higher bit rate, the more you're paying if you're using a hosted service. Before we go on to the music, I might just see if we can get this live demo to give you some idea of how the site works. So this is the homepage of the site. We've got a slideshow here with current events. And I was going to this one. This was an interview we did the other day. It's an exhibition at the Old Parliament House and Canberra of Quilts. And so we interviewed this young lady and a couple of other people, read a bit of a blog about it, and maybe it doesn't work. So that's about a 20-minute interview. It's actually three interviews with a bit of music, a bit of unlicensed, sorry, it's some licensed free music that I found on the internet. Strictly speaking, we can't use copyright music. We don't actually have a podcasting license to use copyright music. But that's kind of how the site works. We also list all our, what we call podcasts, it's not, it doesn't say they're basically, it's basically a list of interviews. And we list those as well so people can refer to them under different categories. So we have a lot of warfare interviews, film festivals, arts and performing, sorry, visual arts and performing arts. And maybe those categories will grow. And the people we interviewed find those valuable, they put references to their own Facebook sites. And we're finding that people are really value the service because they're not getting it anywhere else. So we have music licenses and I'll show about the slides there. It's really important that you have the appropriate license. I don't know if any of you have read about, there's I think a cafe in Melbourne which was recently shut down because after various warnings they kept playing copyright music and the PPCA which is the music publishers, which represents music publishers, basically went to court and they'll find a huge amount of money went out of business. So it is really important if you're getting into this business that you have the appropriate licenses. There are various, I can't really go into the detail, there are a lot of there are a lot of confirm mutations but essentially if you're not for profit, it's not a terribly expensive business but you do need to comply with the rules, which basically means you can't just sort of play 10 albums in a row of your favourite artist, things like that. There's a number of tracks that from particular artists you can play in a particular time and you do need to keep a record of what you're doing. There are two sets of copyrights, there's music creators and there is a say artists and recording companies. You are required to take appropriate measures to stop people stream ripping. Again you have to be seen to be doing the right thing, whether you can stop everyone doing it at any time is a midpoint. But again, these are the requirements of licenses. You may not be allowed to issue detailed playlists in advance. Again that seems to be a fairly arcade thing but it's against the condition of licenses. Not only do they have copyright music on high rotation and you need to keep a record of what you're playing and when you can be asked for it. Let's divert briefly and I've mentioned this briefly in the session we had yesterday. We use Gutenberg quite a lot for our site but one of the issues we've had and I'm told that it will be fixed in a future release, which I'm glad to hear. You can see on the left there that's a list of interviews and that's how it appears in the classic editor. That's how it appears in the Gutenberg editor on the right. Yeah it doesn't handle it well. Basically if I want to add an interview I have to work out what the ID number is and do it manually. So I tend to use the classic editor for that particular for the playlists because it's something that hasn't yet been incorporated properly into Gutenberg. Otherwise I've found we've had a few little quirks along the way but I think Gutenberg is now at a stage where it suits us for the sort of thing that we're doing. The bit about presenting content to listeners, this is where WordPress has a number of things that you can use. You'll see on the right there. This is a screen capture from a site that actually did for the radio station I was talking about before. A couple of things. That's a play button and that appears on just every page on the site so you can just instantly listen to the audio. Down here is a list of programs that are coming up and that basically looks after itself. It's just a repeating calendar display. All the programs are listed in the all-in-one calendar and it's told to look at the next three. It was a good way of doing it so that we weren't constantly having to update it manually. Believe me that's a huge issue. It's really important if you're going to be streaming to make your streaming play prominent otherwise people aren't going to aren't going to see it and put your program guide on the website and if you can publish it to subscribers. Again if you don't be afraid to use social media for that. I want to talk about here about a technical issue and if anyone here who can solve this for me I'll be most grateful. We use Shoutcast which basically relies partly on HTTP rather than HTTPS. On the the display on the these screenshots on the one on the left is what we do when we just use when we use HTTPS which the site generally is and can you spot the difference. All right for HTTPS it's just publishing the name of the site with no playlist. Here it's actually it's actually displaying what we're playing at the time. I'm told that that's a limitation of Shoutcast I don't know but it's something to be aware of but it is good if you can if you can publish a playlist as as you can if you can publish tracks as they're playing that's a that's a great a great feature and something that actually the licenses encourage. Okay the last issue really want to talk about is how you get people to to listen. Now we're not we don't make any big changes about being a being a mass market site. The restriction we have a lot of restrictions placed on us because of the music licensing. One of the things we're going to like to carry advertising. You can get licenses if you want to if you want to pay excuse me four times as much you can you can get a commercial license which which does mean you can put advertising onto the site but the the license we have that doesn't allow us to do that and that's and that's fine because we're you know we're a community we're a community community station we are I guess the equivalent of it's it's like some people volunteer for rotary we we do we do this on a on a voluntary basis so it's not we don't we don't expect revenue from advertising it'd be nice to have it but but we don't it's not it's not a huge issue for us but the option there is is if we want to take advertising we can but we have to we have to look at our licensing. How do you get people how do you okay how many people have you listened to internet radio can I ask, can I ask how do you tell you do sorry okay I'll just go back okay there's APRA and AMCOS APRA is the Australian Performing Rights Association and they cover the rights of music creators I'll have some URLs at the end which you can which you can look at and the ppca which is the the uh which basically covers awesome recording companies and you have to have licenses from both they are going to combine uh sometime next year hopefully simplify the process because it's a dog's beckress at the moment I'm sorry yeah the other thing you can do well there are a couple of there are a couple of suggestions I've got if you if you do decide to do this most cars now have Bluetooth input and you can you can basically as as you did with the old iPods you can use Bluetooth or a wired connection or an old tablet or phone can be a low-cost internet radio receiver I've got several of them at home perfectly perfectly good for the job or you can use one of those that's a an internet capable radio it's got well it does FM and DAB plus as well and you'll see there that it's actually showing you the track that's playing unfortunately there's not a great variety of them available now quite expensive so for most people a mobile or a desktop computer is probably a better solution a few other things to think about hiding your station's URL behind an HTML5 player I say that because you don't necessarily want to be giving out the the actual URL of the station in case you change providers whereas if it's if it's stuck behind a a player you can change that behind the scenes and now it's going to know the difference you need to be aware of latency so it's not like traditional broadcasting where where you can broadcast a time signal and know that know that that time is accurate a typical latency is up to 30 seconds or more depends on where your provider is depends on internet speeds and all that sort of stuff most most 3G and 4G is perfectly adequate you're not going to you're not going to have problems with with dropouts but you will have you will have a delay and you can actually notice that if you listen to rather a web stream from an existing station or even the difference between an FM and a DAB plus station you'll find there's quite a big delay yeah there's some references and links which I'll which I'll include with the the presentation that's the the one I referred to earlier international federation that's the AMA APRA AMCOS ppca and that's a reference about periscope all right be happy to take questions and any feedback