(A little side note but I love how Jason Pontin pretty much took over that entire discussion)
Oh look a fight! There is an app for that! LOL just kidding. I personally love the topic of this week’s blog but I don’t love how it is our last one 😦 I am going to be looking at if I a was content developer for KRFH and if the use/development of a native app would be worth while. Initially just going off the monetary aspect, I know KRFH could never afford an actual developer since “a good developer who has CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of Python, you’re looking a pretty good six figures” according to Mr. Pontin. Since KRFH is student run I bet they could find a computer science student and get them to help but that student probably couldn’t create a super complex app with multiple levels of interfaces, most likely just a simple one for the live streaming of KRFH. Before I would even get into the actual cost of developing an app for KRFH I would want to know if there is even a market and desire for it on our campus.
(a “frictionless” search on “college radio” in itunes got this)
Going off of the popularity of my favorite app store I see only two school specific college radio apps, a whole bunch of sport apps, and a couple of music ones. Based upon my knowledge of KRFH, it is heavily focused on music seemingly, at least in regards to this search, music is not a desire for college radio station apps but sports is. Sport information is now something that people want to know and know instantly. ESPN’s business cards say “To serve fans, anytime, anywhere” which makes sense for them to use apps because it allows for that instant transactions of game, team, and player information. I would also would want to know how many listeners KRFH gets along and then I would like to conduct a survey to see if thats what the listeners want.
Overall I would not want to develop a native app for KRFH, I just dont see a reason for it. KRFH does use radioflag, which is an app for radio stations! (They were actually named top radio station last year!) If i were a content developer I would of used something exactly like this but I would also look into ways to implement KRFH into the humboldt.edu main page. I was mainly inspired by the comment made by Ryan Spoon, “Take readability out, because you can read and surface fantastic content on a dot com in e-mail. You can do that anywhere. There are things that are afforded if you can build it cheaply and with the quality you want that you just can’t get elsewhere….There are things you can do in application that are more powerful than Web. We send billions of score alerts every month and that is a hook back into the application world. If I sent e-mails at the velocity, you’d be really upset. If you’re a subscription magazine, or if your business, like ours, has a very significant video advertising component, again, native in some cases trumps.” Basically this means, know your audience there are certain business that could do great with apps and others that you cant’t and should stay web based in HTML5. Also I am excited for the use of apps in TV and found it surprising that “Netflix now has 36.3 million streaming customers, including 29.2 million in the U.S.”. I didn’t realize Netflix was such a US thing.
Peace out JMC 302!