Virgin Radio Case Study
Virgin Radio, the UK's national rock radio station, interacts with its listeners via the web with 24-hour web site monitoring from Site Confidence.
Establishing an online presence can be a complex process for commercial radio stations, presenting both challenges and opportunities for a brand. Virgin Radio, the nation's rock radio station, realised early on that far from just being able to stream the traditional 'over-the-air' signals over the Internet, a web presence could be a powerful and valuable way of interacting with the station's listeners on a long-term basis. Using SMS and email helps boost listener figures, creating an interaction that simultaneously assists data capture and reduces listener churn, making the station more attractive to advertisers. In addition, with broadband connectivity on the rise (estimated to be 3.5m subscribers in the UK and rising), the potential for online radio is further increased.
Virgin Radio is currently the most listened to online radio station in the world. But it didn't achieve this by being complacent about what its listeners wanted, and it has invested heavily in the development of a technical infrastructure to support the creative output of its DJs. Today, the site allows you to listen to the radio; interact with the DJs by phone, email or text; become a Virgin Radio VIP and receive priority information on bands, events or celebrity gossip; and even download clips or programmes from earlier broadcasts - all of which place differing technical demands on the systems in place.
As its website presence grew, Virgin Radio realised that it could not give its listeners the service they wanted unless it had an objective, external method of monitoring the performance of its site. As a result, Virgin Radio enlisted the help of Site Confidence, the UK's leading web site performance monitoring company. Site Confidence provides an end-to-end service reporting service which monitors a website from a user's perspective, allowing customers to take control of the data on their website and to gain an overall analysis of their site. A specific transaction, for instance clicking on a link, can be monitored at high frequency levels (e.g. once every 5 minutes) to ensure requests for data are being processed as smoothly as possible every hour of the day.
But Virgin Radio quickly realised that the most efficient way to manage its customer-facing functionality (SMS, email etc.) was to integrate these into its web servers, linking databases and archives to give listeners the seamless experience expected of the Virgin Radio brand. Once the systems were all IP-based, however, it could only respond quickly and effectively if it knew immediately when there was a problem. So Site Confidence's initial job (as well as the crucial task of ensuring that the website performed perfectly from a customer's perspective) was to devise a specialist monitoring service especially for Virgin Radio that could assess each individual server on a 24- hour basis. These monitors allowed Site Confidence to immediately pinpoint a problem or error at server-level (rather than when the problem affected the user), and alert Virgin Radio IT staff by SMS in time for them to fix it without a user being aware.
Once it had the web site monitoring set up, Virgin Radio was also keen to know how its streaming performed on a 24-hour basis. The need for an adequate streaming monitoring service gave Site Confidence the necessary insight to begin development of this in-house, and an early version of this service (that checks for the presence of an HTML page to confirm the availability of the streamed broadcast) has already been deployed by Virgin, allowing the station to ensure people can always listen to the radio online.
Site Confidence has also assisted Virgin Radio when updating and altering its web site layout - providing feedback on teething problems caused by changes, smoothing out the technical operation, and helping to justify investment to the board.
Source: Netimperative sector report - Online music, May 2004