Audio
Streaming

Client

Radio Haugaland is a Norwegian radio station with 60,000+ monthly users. The radio station was launched in 1989 and has since produced daily news broadcasts, providing entertainment and music.
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Challenge

Radio Haugaland broadcasts music and shows for people living on the western coast of Norway. As most radio listeners live in remote areas, the app should go easy on traffic. For this purpose, we needed to implement xHE-AAC that wasn't natively supported in 2014 by both iOS and Android yet. This codec was a great fit for our task to compress files without significant losses.

Another important feature was sending messages to DJs. One of Radio Haugaland channels, Aktuelt Haugalandet, broadcasts current news, including incident reports from locals.

Also, Radio Haugaland uploads podcasts on Soundcloud and wanted to implement this feature in the app as well.

Solution

It was one of the first projects for our team. We teamed up with Radio Haugaland and held several meetings to discuss their vision and requirements.

After that, we reached out for Fraunhofer IIS regarding the implementation of xHE-AAC streaming and got consultations from the codec provider. Based on their advice, we decided to use HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) by Apple to implement xHE-AAC support. The codec implementation required a lot of tuning by hand, but our expertise in streaming helped to successfully execute the project.

As a client had a restricted budget, the project was divided into several steps: we created an Android app first, then delivered versions for iPhone and iPad.

During the development phase, the following technical solutions were implemented: the frontend using native iOS and Android frameworks, integration of xHE-AAC with the help of HLS, small design edits.