Next week should begin the new season of Radio Free Finland and I’m making a few changes, here goes…
- Radio Free Finland will be every Monday night at 21.00 (9pm) instead of Sunday nights at 22.00. I’m doing this for two reasons, I hope to get more live participants and I don’t want to spend lazy Sundays worrying about that night’s show.
- The show will not have a absolute time limit of one hour, some shows will be less, some may be more.
- We’ll probably only have just one guest per episode, last season we occasionally had two. (Finding guests has proved to be a very difficult task)
- The show will remain live and interactive, but we’ll broadcast it via Skype using “Skypecasting” and after the live show it will then be available for download in mp3 format as normal.
For those who don’t know about Skypecasting, it’s a way for lots of Skype users (100 max) to all chat in one room in a controlled environment. The host and the guest will talk while the others listen - if you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can push a button to “request the mic” and have your say. Skype users can also write in questions to be asked “on the air”. Listeners can still e-mail their questions in before the show, but during the show I won’t check e-mail, just Skype. I doubt we’ll keep that land-line phone number, it costs like 40e/year I believe and was rarely used.
From the recent poll results, it looks like most of you have Skype or can easily download it. For those who don’t have it, you should get it, it’s simple to setup and completely free and IMO, the best chat software out there. Last season I was paying $20 (US) a month to broadcast the show live via Windows Media, and the service wasn’t reliable - Skypecasting is totally free. Plus, only about 1-2% of you actually listen to the show live - one show last year I had 3,000 downloads during the days after the show and only 74 people listened to it live. Another show I had about 1,000 downloads and the number of live listeners were in the single digits.
…okay, that’s about it. I hope the new changes will encourage more people to participate in the live weekly broadcast. Looking forward to another fun season of Radio Free Finland, hope you are too!!