Show HN: A Twilio-powered interactive talk radio platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Twilio-powered interactive talk radio platform

capiche.fm

122 pointsawwstn56 comments

The help page (link is buried in the footer) has a more useful description than the home page.

"How does Capiche FM work?

Phone calls, broadcast live online.

You start a broadcast, Capiche calls your phone, and you go live. Then everything you say gets live-streamed to anyone who’s dialed into your show.

Fans and friends (and foes, if you want) can call a Capiche FM show’s number to listen on a phone call (yup: every show has its own phone number), or just open a new tab and stream the show online from the show's page. Hosts can invite anyone on air to chat live, too."

EDIT: Honestly your help page is great. Concise description about what it is and how to use it. You should consider bringing some of that content to the homepage. The skateboarding heart person is neat, but I'd rather you tell me about the product.

Appreciate that feedback. We'll update the homepage tonight!

I've got one of those old grandfathered "limited minutes, unlimited data" plans, so the phone bit doesn't really work for me.

Streaming audio over WebRTC, though...

I'm curious about the business model. This has got to cost a metric fuckton in Twilio API usage. Is the plan to prove growth then build your own pipes to reduce the cost?

This feels like the free conference calling that just so happened to run on rural exchange numbers, so the more inboubd minutes, the better. But payments to rural carriers is either dead or dying.

If I'm understanding correctly, it does look like twilio has a lower rate for conference call minute/participant than general calling, but still $0.002 / minute / person adds up quick.

I don't get it. Why is the stream done via phone instead of just clicking a button on a webpage? Is there some advantage to using the phone?

It's a fun gimmick.

It's definitely costing them more to do it over the phone.

Well, there is a bit more to it... basically, the phone is really simple and everyone knows how to use it.

It allows access to the microphone without tech support issues (adjust microphone volume, give browser permissions etc).

Beyond that, listening also allows you to just call into a phone number and listen to a show - without expending your mobile data allowance.

There are many places in a lot of countries where you can have a landline but neither good speed internet nor cell phone reception. These places exist even a few 10s of kilometers away from the new Tesla factory in Germany.

For voice, I don't think you need a "good speed" internet connection?

Probably doesn't need to be fast, but reliable. Something with high latency or that drops packets would still give garbled audio, whether it's at a high or low resolution.

Hi everyone! Thanks for checking out Capiche FM. It's so early that we haven't yet come up with the best way to feature shows on the homepage, which seems to be a sticking point in some of the first comments on here.

Here's a public page where you can see some of the shows currently being hosted on Capiche FM: https://capiche.fm/discover

And here's a link to our changelog which some commenters said describes our product better than the homepage: https://www.notion.so/capiche/What-s-new-on-Capiche-FM-e56f6...

Appreciate all the feedback!

It's a pretty neat idea. For homepage content consider bringing some of your help page content over. Your help page is great, concise description about what it is and how to use it. The skateboarding heart person is neat, but I'd rather you tell me about the product.

Hows the audio quality? / Can I broadcast via the Internet instead of a voice call? One thing that always bugs me with classic, terrestrial talk radio is when a guest caller calls in with tinny, heavily compressed audio vs the hosts crisp clean audio. I suppose it wouldn't be as noticeable if the hosts have similar audio quality to the guests.

Matt from the Capiche team here—Thanks, appreciate the feedback!

You can check the audio quality in some recent broadcasts, including those featured on these shows that were live today: https://capiche.fm/loup, https://capiche.fm/saas/, and https://capiche.fm/whybehindx. It's powered by phone calls, so for now the quality is exactly what you get from a phone call—and everyone talking, hosts and guests alike, have the same quality. We're working on improving that though!

The quality is pretty good actually, I guess it depends on the caller's phone and reception. After listening bits of those shows, I think having everyone on, more or less, the same audio equipment addresses my complaint about old school radio. I always found my self having to turn up the volume to hear call-ins, and then turn it back down when the host started talking again. Having everyone dialed in via phone normalizes the audio across the host and guest somewhat. Keep up the good work!

Excellent idea (and great name). Best of luck!

Was excited to see one of my friends featured on the homepage! What a small world. Ha!

You should provide a demo of the service or even allow users to trail the site without having to enter any information to sign up. I will never enter a phone number or email until I'm satisfied with the product. I have no idea how it will work or what I am getting.

I agree. I wouldn't need to try it, but a good promotional video on the front page showing how it works and the UI after you sign up would be good. Add in the pricing at the end as well. What's free, what are the limits and how much it costs after that.

Oh, what a coincidence – I just finished talking on https://capiche.fm/saas

The idea is rather relaxing because I don't own an expensive mic, and my office has an echo. But on Capiche podcasts, the hosts have a meh audio quality too because everybody is talking through a phone call compression. :)

I wonder if non-US numbers will appear later because I was lucky to have a US Skype number, otherwise it would be hard to avoid the international fees.

Feedback: I did four years of college radio and have wanted to host my own call-in show since I was a kid, and this is seriously what I've been looking for recently.

I do a weekly podcast with my good friend and am going to try it out the next time I record a podcast but I have a couple of thoughts off the bat:

1. Using my phone means I can't (easily) use my condenser mic and pro headphones like I do with my laptop.

2. Rights/Distribution: I currently have 100% ownership over the content I create and I can choose where to distribute it because I have the raw files. Your terms seem on the face to be amenable to me being able to pick up and move my content. I'll be interested to see if you make the content I send through you available for me to download - or if it's required for me to (somehow) also make a recording of my own , which might cause trouble later.

I'm excited for this and think it could be big, and understand it's an MVP right now, so plenty to come just a couple things to think about.

Awesome!

On #1, you could get a VOIP number that will handle text messages and use a SIP/Soft phone that will work with your mic and headphones.

That's certainly not "easily"

A browser based web interface (like meet) would suffice just fine

Hey Andrew, Matt from the Capiche team here—thank you so much for your feedback!

Great point on phone calls making it difficult to use mics and more. On the one hand from a broadcasting perspective, I've found that freeing as there's less to worry about. You just pick up the phone call and start talking and don't think about everything else. But we do want to improve audio quality, so expect more options here going forward including web broadcasting!

Then, on recordings: When you wrap up a broadcast (which happens in Capiche when you hang up the phone after live streaming), you can download an mp3 of your call, or can go back and download it again anytime later. So you never have to think about recording, and can still always have a full copy of everything you broadcast.

Email anytime if you have any more ideas here!

Would like to second and add that custom web broadcasting options would be a much needed feature, at least for me. Really cool website and product idea, tho.

I think many of your first-time visitors are going to click the hosts' faces, get confused when nothing happens, and then give up.

That should at least take them to a description of the show, and ideally let them listen to a clip.

Definitely baffled by this!

Matt from the Capiche team here—great feedback! If you check the Discover page linked below the avatars (https://capiche.fm/discover) you can click through to any of the featured shows and check out their recent broadcasts—and you'll also see if any shows are currently broadcasting live at the top of that page. Then we'll be tweaking the homepage a bit ASAP!

Could anyone provide a clear explanation as to what this does? I don’t want to give away my phone number. Thank you!

Probably the simplest description is "Twitch for audio". Anyone can launch a talk radio show on Capiche FM from your phone, and stream it to unlimited people online. And, it's interactive so listeners can send in messages and request to come on air anytime. Happy to answer any other questions!

Could you provide a demo?

Here's an example of a show page with an episode that was recorded today: https://capiche.fm/loup

This looks really cool.

I bet you have a feature in your backlog to automate adding things like the legal disclaimer at the beginning of that podcast. Having that read in a very unexcited voice set the tone, unfortunately. But, so much opportunity here, nice work!

Thank you

The changelog [0] does a better job of explaining what it does than the website itself does

0: https://www.notion.so/What-s-new-on-Capiche-FM-e56f62fe9d204...

I love the scuffed clubhouse clone vibe! I wanna try this!

If this is Twilio powered, and uses Twilio conferences, it would be limited to 250 participants which seems low for a radio platform. https://www.twilio.com/voice/conference

It’s limited to 250 speakers at a time. We stream to the web and unlimited people can tune in!

You need a friend to join you on the call to be able broadcast? I’d have a very hard time doing that, but would love to just talk into the ether solo. Creates an unnecessary network effect barrier IMO.

I was an early user... the spam was so insane that I had to block their number.

Be aware.

Can I listen to people without signing up?

Also, isn't this equivalent to YouTube, Twitch, or whatever streaming platform kids are using these days, without a video feed?

Yes, you can listen online without signing up. It is similar to Twitch etc, but has features catering to audio streaming that you wont find on other platforms.

How? Can you share a link that we can listen to?

Matt from the Capiche team here.

You can listen to past broadcasts on any Capiche FM show page, including these that were live today: https://capiche.fm/saas/ and https://capiche.fm/loup among others.

Then, if those (or any other show) are broadcasting live right now, you'll see the live audio player instead of the past broadcast, and can tune in while they're talking.

Seems kinda like a party line? (not a fun party, I mean, just... multiple people in the same 'room' on a phone).

Can't stand the quality, but I'm sure this will be fixed with the iOS app they are building.

Very cool! How are you acquiring users and marketing the service?

Anyone else remember Utterz from around 2008?

> By confirming my info above and clicking "Submit", I consent to Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and to receive personal messages and automated text alerts (which may be marketing in nature) from Capiche FM. Consent not a condition of any purchase. Msg frequency will vary. Msg & data rates may apply. Text STOP to cancel anytime.

I would be extremely vary about this service. Not only it explicitly violates GDPR, but it may also substantially increase your phone bill.

I keep hearing about Twilio but what is it?

Twilio[0] is company with a communications API. They have an API that allows you to do phone calls, SMS, fax, video calls, email, etc. If you've every used an app that sends you SMS it was most likely powered by their API.

[0] https://www.twilio.com/

Looks cool. How did you get feedback from Jason Fried? Just cold-emailed him? Or was he helping in some way?

I was interested in this, then saw this in the terms: "moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property or proprietary right; (ii) slander, defame, libel, or invade the right of privacy, publicity or other property rights of any other person; or (iii) cause Capiche to violate any law or regulation; and your User Content could not be deemed by a reasonable person to be objectionable, profane, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, hateful, or otherwise inappropriate."

So - I will suggest that you make whatever export options a thing. If I could auto-export all my data, I might give it a whirl.

I had a similar experience looking into anchorFM - looked neat - like what I was needing exactly (like this maybe) - checked the terms and checked out.

With today's cancel culture what it is, I can't see buying into a SaaS that will punt so easily - I don't know if export is an option - I don't know if it's a lockout kind of thing like google does - or if you have time to get your content like wordpress.com does.. but I can build this and not worry about it, other people may want to know.

and to add to that - if you package the code and we can self-host it and connect with twillio api and all that, I could see spending a couple hundred bucks to buy it and not have to worry about the politically-correct wanna be cancel police getting it pulled.. that way I don't have to worry who gets nervous about content complaints and how that gets handled at your place.

This appears to be a VC backed venture. They're not giving their code away.

Interesting actually. I just skimmed the 'about' and did nothing jumped out at me saying 'vc backed' - but maybe there are other clues I should look for 'vc backed' with things in the future.

This has made me consider more about vc backed things - they mostly have to go for certain business models and it limits things I guess.

my comment was saying I would buy the code to run on our servers, not asking to give it away. I do this with some local software and some server software. It's a fine choice to not make it available that way.

I was merely offering a different view point some may want to consider - not suggesting that their current model was flawed.

No matter how many VCs want to be the next adobe, I only use software I don't have to subscribe to, and try to only user services where I have easy export of data. Certainly I am not the majority of users in the world.

I wonder how many more will start to shift after getting burned by vendor lockin though, certainly I'm not the only one that has spend time and money with other people's platforms and had them change a business model or terms of content and then lost all of that time and content.

I imagine the number of people with that bad taste in their mouth will continue to grow. This is not to say that I expect the youtube/adobe etc biz models to fail because if it. Just offering a glance at a market that may not be considered.

I'm working on an open source project similar to this. It uses Twilio as an option for calling in, but DJs/hosts can use a mic or connect a mixer/turntable via USB audio interface and stream directly without using Twilio. Hoping to make the first release next week.

There's a Raspberry Pi client for remote broadcasts.

Here's a demo where you can see chat controlled DJ room where you can cue up songs in the station's library: https://radiogbv.com/

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