The Cultural Broadcasting Archive (CBA) is a civil society media and communication platform. In addition, CBA is Austria’s largest podcast provider with completely free access. CBA is now to be expanded in the German-speaking region.
Datasets and the community
The focus with the CBA is for the Endnutzer:innen on speed. The data packets are encoded and reduced in size by the CBA after upload. This saves a lot of bandwidth and the page loads faster for the end users. CBA sorts the contributions according to the production date, so the topics remain sorted on a daily basis and are not dependent on the broadcasting time of the individual radios. If desired by the editors of the podcasts, there is a comment function. Consequently, it is easier to get in touch with the editors and give feedback. Subscriptions can be made via the CBA to individual broadcast/podcast series, individual radio stations and the entire archive.
Community management and exchange platform
The CBA offers the content creator the possibility to be used as an exchange platform – even for works with exploitation rights in the contribution/podcast or broadcast. Individual contributions can be password-protected and thus only offered for download in a restricted manner. Only other content creators can access the audio, download it and make it available for broadcast exchange while logged in. The content creator can also activate the comment function on the audio. If the comment function is active, a community page opens in the backend. There, the feedback and comments can be viewed and managed, allowing the content creator to interact with the community.
Although the individual podcasts and radio stations upload their contributions centrally to the CBA, the design of the frontend can be adapted individually to each radio station/podcaster. Thus, it is not obvious to the end user that the data comes from CBA. Thanks to extensive statistics, call numbers and trends are directly visible for the content creator. A big advantage compared to many media libraries and blogs of radio stations, which have not implemented any evaluation in the backend.
Still a dream of the future
The CBA is currently working on a speech-to-text algorithm. Automatic transcripts are created in the background to make the site even more user-friendly. The transcribed data can not only be used to subtitle posts and thus break down further barriers on the website, but also to make podcasts and broadcasts easier to find.
Last but not least, a subscription function is on the horizon. One can register as a fan or listener:in of the podcast. The content creators can then crowdfund and do community building. The idea is not to monetize the content, but to generate donations.
All info about the CBA is available at https://cba.fro.at. The automated transcripts are created by OpenAudioSearch.
