NPR One
npr.org
npr.org
Side note: Is it just me, or this "scroll to reveal stuff in steps" is a bit frustrating? It seems to be used more and more often and I am sometimes puzzled by the fact that I'm missing the scrolling step. I try scrolling and get either too far (which shows half an image coming from above) or don't get anywhere (which makes me scroll more and skip steps). Here's an example: http://www.spendeeapp.com/
Am I doing something wrong?
Yeah, it is definitely whacked for desktops, and I know it's supposed to be somehow good for mobile, but I don't get that either. What's the theory behind it improving the mobile experience? Is it supposed to save bandwidth or something? Because I'm not sure if it's loading the content on scroll or preloading all and merely animating on scroll.
Either way, bandwidth is becoming less of a problem, so I can't see why we'd be launching new design trends to address it.
That said, I hate it too. I want to scroll normally.
But if you do that, it had better be well implemented -- and that is clearly where this falls short. User input translates into on-screen behavior inconsistently, arrow keys are basically broken. When you're trying to replace something so basic as scrolling, this is an interesting case study in just how frustrated users will get with even small frustrations. I've found that even the (now) more typical load-on-demand pages drive me nuts when there's no more than a momentary hitch in the scrolling to load more content. Though maybe I'm just easily bothered by such things.
Its just not smooth enough.
Terrible design.
The stream is great and I've been an ASC listener since it was a semi-regular podcast I would download. Now I have it running in Radio Tray on my desktop most days, and I don't want something interactive.
The primary attractions for me are 1) It works overseas (I'm in Europe) 2) It is consumed passively, and 3) The curation of the music stream is superb. You can even email Bob feedback on songs and he writes you back. I think it's one of the coolest and most enjoyable things on the Internet.
I'm not against a new interactive app for people to use on their mobiles, but this in now way replaces the stream for me.
Page designers need to consider that navigation is not always continuous.
It just makes all the images stuck in place and scrolls like a normal fucking webpage. I put it on my standard widescreen one, and yeah, pg-up/pg-dn, up/dn just completely destroyed the page.
I just wish Says You would release their episodes as a podcast.
Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing, ain't it? The vast majority of NPR's funding comes from advertisers, excuse me, underwriters.
Edit: Well fuck me I'm wrong. Carry on, citizen.
No, it doesn't. From what I can see, it's more like 17%.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
Well that sponsorship was obviously well-spent!
"Program fees and dues paid by our Member Stations are the largest portion of NPR's revenue. This includes fees paid to air the NPR newsmagazines, other programming we produce and distribute and annual member dues." and
Content programming fees are NPR's main form of revenue. When your station WXYZ holds a fundraiser, you donate to them, not to NPR. WXYZ pays NPR on a sliding scale. A station with 1 million listeners pays roughly 10x what a station with 100k listeners pay. NPR is actually barred from accepting donations directly, again "bypass". (NPR can take big one-time gifts, like the Joan Kroc $250M).
Stations pay the biggest dollars for the big "tent pole" shows (Morning Edition/All Things Considered) and this supports many other program and functions. In the FM world, stations have basically had exclusive distribution right. Digital changes that, of course, and creates the "bypass" I mentioned below. This is why you've never seen a ME/ATC podcast (I'm the anonymous answerer here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-NPR-not-offer-All-Things-Consi...)
It's very possible (and was being discussed) that since listeners are logged on, NPR One could know if you're a supporter and suppress the pledge drive.
The challenge is that NPR and it's stations are still tethered together by the governance model. No one can "go it alone" without some changes, they'll either weather disruption together or fail together.
The cost isn't just for the translators however - most of our stations also produce content themselves that is local, and many produce their own shows as well. Those are not small investments, but a smaller audience in a rural area means fewer people to raise support from. Our Alaska stations actually band together to help keep radio going across Alaska, though population is thinner.
This is the biggest problem with audio apps these days - you get everyone trying to make a similar thing, and because they're all competing they all try and lock each other out of their own products.
What would be so much better is a content-agnostic platform, that'll let you play whatever the hell you want - whether it's music, talk radio, podcasts, whatever.
Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?
Pocket Casts is awesome but there have been times when I really wanted a web version. Lately though I use Chromecast from the app when I'd normally want the PC to play the track.
The question is whether the product is used frequently enough and can actually make use of a custom interface, compared to whether a more generic app would actually provide value. If I would use the generic app to listen to NPR 95% of the time, then it probably makes more sense to dedicate the app to NPR and just use a web browser for the other 5%.
Reversing XKCD, it's probably better to think of apps as slightly heavy and custom websites. There's really not much loss in having lots more apps so long as they're lighweight. Throw them all into a folder on your homescreen.
If you want live radio, you can stream from mobile Safari. I'm not sure about others. Music, of course, has always been available. Since before smart phones, even.
In short, you don't need these apps any more than most other apps.
I can't comment on this new app yet but I'm a near daily user of the regular NPR app (which I think is officially called "NPR news"). It's way better than any generic radio app I've tried.
Besides listening to the individual local stations, you can also get the latest news (the ~4-minute hourly blurb), can create playlists of entire shows (without the interludes, i.e. just the content), and built-in news articles (for reading, not listening). I've even used the local NPR station finder to help me tune an analog radio when in a new city where I'm not familiar with the local stations.
It'd take quite a bit of agreement on content licensing and data formats to have anything like that be as usable as the NPR app across multiple content providers.
> Seriously - why does everyone assume that if I want to listen to e.g. NPR, I only want to listen to NPR?
Well some of us do :D
Why? So I can escape the soul-crushing drudgery of Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion. They're good shows, but they're essentially the same show, repeated thousands of times. And no matter where I am, they seem to be what's on the local NPR station.
So I already have apps (or streams in the Radium app) for the CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc. If this new NPR app lets me listen without needing to constantly fiddle with my phone and select stories, I'll use it a lot.
Incidentally, I feel like as smartphones become more ubiquitous and embedded into the rest of our lives, we'll start to see apps that have a much more simple purpose. After all, since Siri isn't programmable by app developers, the fastest way to listen to NPR is now downloading the app, holding your home button, and saying "Open NPR One". Perhaps the app could be designed so that it immediately begins streaming when you open it, that way you can just tell your phone something and suddenly you're listening to the radio.
All of this audio streaming is on a consistent platform, it's mostly Icecast or SHOUTcast servers doing the actual streaming. Theoretically, one could build a directory of radio stations like Nullsoft did with SHOUTcast, but the main issue is the platform has never been created by a company whose SOLE PURPOSE is to index and catalog current radio stations. Until we get that, I don't think you're gonna see a platform improvement any time soon.
They're adding a new way to access their media because it does things that the generic clients can't. That doesn't mean the other distribution channels are going away.
Yeah, they aren't iheartradio or anything.
Also, why do all these damned apps have ridiculous access requirements ? In recent weeks I have been dismayed to find that HBO Go and Sonos apps both require access to all of my media files (android app) in order to be installed.
I'll bet that's not uncommon. Presumably it's just lazy development by people that don't know the finer points of the SDKs, etc., but it's pretty ridiculous what a lot of these apps (that, as the parent points out, aren't really necessary anyway[1]) require.
[1] HBO Go does not need to be an app, as demonstrated by the fact that I use it in my browser (OSX) every day.
Yeah, I suppose they don't want to be too granular and overwhelm users with a ton of permissions but, to your point, it actually makes things worse. Overly broad categories lead to suspicion.
It's funny though, because for years, we all downloaded/installed desktop apps which had free reign on our machines. I suppose the facts that apps can come from untrusted sources, are thought to have more specific functions, are installed on very personal devices, and were born in an age where privacy concerns/fraud/malware/connectedness were common, all have something to do with it.
I wonder, though, if our concern is mostly stimulated by the fact that we're now being presented with permission choices in the first place. As, now, even "trusted" brands like HBO can earn our suspicion if we think their apps are being greedy with permission requests.
We can't fault a company (or non-profit organization for that matter) for following their optimal strategy, can we? Sure it's an annoyance to the end-user because it fragments the market, but that's where there's an opportunity for a disruption!
If everything were on iTunes, would that make you happy? It's clear to me that the cut that Apple is taking (for the benefit of inclusion on their "content-agnostic platform") is something that is untenable for NPR and many other similar content producers out there.
NPR also has an excellent website where you can listen to their content on mobile devices.
This app is a third way to access their content. It doesn’t make sense for everyone (if someone only listens to one NPR show – for example Planet Money – and also a lot of other, similar audio content from other sources I would recommend getting a podcast app they like; if someone only occasionally listens to NPR – for example when someone recommends them something specific – I would recommend just visiting the website), but it can make sense for certain people.
So no, NPR very much does not assume that you only want to listen to NPR. That’s a completely incorrect assumption on your part.
If you want everything get a podcast app. NPR has nothing against podcasts and you can get the right feeds from them. If NPR would want to discontinue offering podcast feeds you would have a point … but as it stands right now you just sound incoherent and uninformed.
Edit: Ok, there are several excellent podcast apps on iOS. No idea about Android, could be royally broken there, but I don’t really care. That platform is broken, anyway. More broken than iOS at least. Podcast apps on iOS are a healthy category with lots of competition and radically different approaches – so there should be an at least acceptable app for everyone.
Why would I cooperate with a central platform, when once its achieves market dominance, it uses that position to dictate my profit margins?
Nobody "owns" RSS for example.
Is this stopping you from getting NPR content in a regular podcatcher? Do they have an annoying "app-wall" forcing you to install the app when you visit npr.org on a mobile device? No? Then I don't see what the problem is.
I also listen to shows that aren't carried locally, and of course, time listening through the NPR app is time not spent listening to KUT directly (which I probably would do if there weren't alternatives, because I'm pretty much an NPR junkie).
Just glancing at the app, I don't think there is anything here that you couldn't currently do in the NPR app ecosystem. For example there is already an NPR app that lets you choose radio stations or just programs from around the world and a lot of local stations built their own, independent app (though in my experience those are lower quality)
This new app seamlessly mixes in content from your local station and features the local content prominently.
I think they have done a fantastic job here and are working hard to do good by their local stations.
Assuming the killer feature here is that it's curated or somehow personalized, and not just something that plays all NPR shows (the page is a bit vague), it seems like you could replace this with a service that generates personalized RSS feeds on the fly, server-side. That way it can integrate directly into your own podcast-listening workflow, where you might have plugins or some specific setup that you prefer to use.
Finding and subscribing to a new podcast, even if they know which one they want and can get to the website is an almost 100% fail rate.
Even for me, discovery is broken. I'm sure there is interesting stuff out there that I can't find.
In any case, I think that between an app that people know to install and and click on an RSS feed that they have no idea what to do with, the app is the better choice.
If they are primarily worried about people having trouble downloading podcasts for whatever reason, it seems like they could have saved themselves a lot of work by just contacting some of the biggest podcast apps on the market (BeyondPod I think is the biggest) about making it easy to subscribe to this particular feed. They could make a custom-built plugin that just installs the feed, they could potentially license a special distribution of the app that has the feed pre-installed.
Fragmentation of the audio listening market is really not justified and is not really going to help anything.
I think the user facing side of RSS and the other metaphors and conventions around podcasts are broken. Discovery is broken. So, I'm ok with fragmentation. Maybe there is a better way out there to be discovered.
Also, I see no reason both shouldn't exist. Why not make the thing you want?
There are about 2 dozen endpoints that aren't public, either because they have little use outside the building, they may contain sensitive info, or they are valuable but only available with licensing. I'm going to explain NPR's finances a bit more in the above thread.
EDITs: I'll add that off the top of my head, some of the private APIs that power NPR one are used in at least one connected TV app that may not have launched, and also in some car partners. We built a great API on top of NPR's internal library database a few years back. Librarians tag the people, movies, songs, etc. used in every NPR radio story going back decades. That one isn't yet robust enough to handle outside use, but if they release it it's really interesting.
The story API (public, above) is the workhorse. Literally every mobile/car/web app and all stations and other websites syndicating NPR content use that one.
We're really excited about NPR One, too and glad to be part of it as well.
I pretty much get NPR hourly news updates, Fresh Air, interspersed with episodes of Marc Maron's WTF and some random stuff like A16Z and stuff from the BBC. It's pretty much ideal.
I love NPR, and before Swell would just have the local station on all day, but I find that NPR doesn't make enough content to fill up a whole day of straight listening (at least not enough content that I like) - I wonder if the NPR One app would automatically find shows from their archive that I might be interested in to fill the time.
I'd be curious if other users of Swell will be switching to this app, or if they, like me, see it as a slightly different and improved model to tie together content from a variety of different sources.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/apple-to-buy-swell-for-30-m...
I really dislike this new "Powerpoint slide" presentation trend.
Usually these are driven by some custom js.
1. Play stories local to where you live. 2. A lot of shows on NPR aren't straight news, so it'll remember which shows you particularly enjoy.
NPR's news segments are top notch journalism. You'd be hard-pressed to find another media institution as large as NPR in the US that does nearly as good of a job in my opinion.
I'd say the opposite: News shouldn't be a thing where other people can tell me what I am "allowed" to read or not.
I left my job at CNET/CBS earlier this year to found a bay area startup -- http://recent.io/ -- with a news recommendation engine and accompanying Android/iOS apps. You can choose to read personalized "Recommended for me" articles, or certain topics, or top news articles, etc. The Recommended category is unique to you; the other categories are common to everyone.
I've shipped the alpha to a few testers, and you're welcome to sign up for the beta. After using it for a bit, you might have a different opinion about whether you should be "allowed" to select what you're interested in, or delegate that in part to a recommendation engine.
For example, if Planet Money produced a monthly bonus episode for, say, $5, I know I wouldn't think twice before tapping "Buy".
At least, that's how I would do it. NPR is missing out on a big donation opportunity by not taking advantage of an app store's built-in in-app purchase/donation infrastructure.
NPR is not state media. That would be Voice of America, which is not allowed to broadcast in the US.
"According to the 2009 financial statement, about 50% of NPR revenues come from the fees it charges member stations for programming and distribution charges."[0]
*edit - now seeing all the answers below
It was founded, initially, with funding from congress, as an independent, non-profit broadcaster. Currently, NPR receives very little to no funding from the Government. Something like 2% of NPR's funding comes from state, local, and national government. Though individual stations may receive radically varying amounts of government funding.
It is Public in the sense that it serves the public interest and is funded by listeners.
There is a good article here on its status:
http://www.npr.org/yourturn/ombudsman/2001/011228.html
"Legally speaking, NPR is a private, not-for-profit corporation chartered by the District of Columbia and qualified by the Internal Revenue Service as a "501(c)(3)" organization exempt from taxation. "
What would be worth charging money for is an app that could cache a configurable number of hours of new curated content when connected to wifi. Even so, that's not really any different from podcasts.
I feel like the world is still very much in a transitional state with regards to how we think about apps. NPR offers its stuff over the air for free, but you write some code to do the same thing with a computer, and suddenly people are saying it should cost money.
A lot of the available content categories aren't specific to New York, so it might be worth checking out regardless of where you live.
Not sure if I'd actually use this app, but just wanted to say you guys in the states are fortunate to have NPR producing top quality radio!
Lots more reporters. Lots and LOTS more reporters. The world is a big place, and the list of crucial, complex, reportable issues is growing by the day.
Then we can enjoy the "curation" work of the producers of the fine programs you put on the air and online—have you heard them? They're really a pretty good example of curated content. (Of course, those programs used to simply be called good broadcast journalism.)
Anyone else had better luck?
Pandora One.
Ubuntu One.
NPR One.
Stop it!
They stopped this one.