Delivering a step changing new feature set for Global
Launching time skip and live replay functionality to engage over 26 million users
Europe's largest radio and outdoor company, Global, owns some of the best loved radio stations in the UK, including Heart, Capital, LBC, Smooth and Classic FM. It continues to be a market leader in commercial radio, entertaining 26.7 million people every week.
BUSINESS NEED
Provide a seamless streaming experience that drives engagement.
CUSTOMER DEMAND
An easy-to-use radio player with time skip and replay functionality.
Challenge
Despite being the UK's leading commercial broadcaster, Global Player didn't yet give customers the ability to rewind and replay live programmes - functionality that users have come to expect from their streaming providers both in audio and video.
Global's ambitions were to offer two modes to listen to their radio programmes - a live mode and a replay mode - and consolidate both streams into a single player to deliver a frictionless user experience.
Candyspace deployed a multidisciplinary product team - comprising iOS, Android and web developers; a QA engineer, and a product/delivery manager - to develop two new integral features of the player. The ‘Live Restart’ feature enables users to restart live programmes. The ‘Time Shift’ feature allows users to rewind to any point in the show, as well as pause and resume live content.
To allow users to seamlessly skip between listening to live content and restarting a programme, we implemented an easy-to-use interface which allows users to see what mode they are viewing through ‘Live’ and ‘Replay’ badges, and gives them the ability to skip certain songs when listening in ‘Restart Mode’.
In addition to ‘Live Restart’ and ‘Time Shift’, we developed a number of additional features on the Global Player product roadmap. These included an upgraded progress bar across Android and Web, enhanced lock screen functionality and advanced analytics.
Candyspace’s product squad worked alongside Global’s internal product teams to deliver both features across all device types. We worked as part of an Agile team within the business, participating in daily stand-ups, end of sprint retrospectives, demos and sprint planning meetings.
Results
We launched the new feature set across all devices within less than six months. Following the launch of 'Live Restart' and 'Time Shift', Global achieved their highest audience rate to date, reaching 26.7 million weekly listeners and achieving a record 27.8% online listening share in Q1 2024. In the same quarter, online listening overtook analogue FM/AM listening for the first time in history on all radio, with the highest ever listening share (27.8%) compared to analogue (27.0%), mainly down to growth in commercial radio, where Global remains the number one in the UK.
We chose Candyspace for their technical expertise and relevant experience, but above all because of the fit with our development team. They seamlessly integrated into a highly complex project which touched on multiple different teams and business functions. The end product has been excellent, built on time, to spec and of high quality. Above all it was built in a way that our developers could take on the codebase, and continue to iterate and maintain, adding in functionality like meta data and ad insertion.
