One of New York’s most creative radio stations has embraced the SGrecast podcast management and live stream repurposing solution from StreamGuys. Known as New York’s source for music discovery, WFUV (90.7FM) has been a non-commercial, member-supported, public media service of Fordham University in the Bronx for more than 70 years.
WFUV has received national recognition for its unique weekday format of adult album alternative music, award-winning local news and sports, and diverse weekend programming lineup. The station is no stranger to StreamGuys. It has been using the company’s live streaming services for nearly 15 years, leverages StreamGuys’ third-party monetization platform integration to incorporate pre-roll advertising from the station’s underwriters, and uses its analytics and reporting tools to garner audience insights. So, when the station got serious about podcasting ambitions, it turned to StreamGuys.
Our news and sports staff are mostly students at the university – they can just go into SGrecast, create a new podcast on the fly
“We were slow to join the podcasting game, but we knew we needed to ramp up our podcast presence,” said Jim O’Hara, associate director of technical operations at WFUV. “SGrecast is the perfect platform to enable us to do that. We don’t have a large technical staff, but users don’t need to be technical to use the system. Our news and sports staff are mostly students at the university. They can just go into SGrecast, create a new podcast on the fly, and upload some episodes. They’ll have a brand new podcast up and running in minutes, without needing oversight or interaction from our technical staff.”
WFUV’s website also offers a two-week, rolling, on-demand archive of programs from its live weekend broadcasts, and SGrecast has enabled the station to automate the process. “We use SGrecast’s side channel recorders to capture our live stream and make audio of our shows instantly available on-demand,” O’Hara explained. “It’s a completely automated system, which is great for us since we don’t have a lot of human resources to dedicate to these jobs. It’s also great for our listeners since it lets them catch up on any shows they miss.”