From Otto Radio to Otto Everywhere
Radio’s Future from Cars to Connected Devices
Otto Radio was born on a stretch of Highway 101 between San Francisco and Palo Alto with a simple, but powerful premise — that the many hours you spend on the go can be transformed into an opportunity to learn, be entertained and stay informed.
Our Co-Founder Stanley Yuan’s daily commute was eating up two hours of valuable time each day, so he started curating his own audio stories and podcasts. It did the trick. His commute became an audio adventure — part exploration and part education about the things he truly cared about. But the two hours he was putting to good use during his commute was being offset by the 20, 30, and even 60 minutes spent finding and assembling those playlists.
“It was a time consuming, frustrating process trying to assemble a daily playlist of interesting interviews, stories and programs. To make the most of my drive, I’d have to spend time the night before combing through shows like Charlie Rose and Freakonomics. If I forgot to prepare my playlist, I would end up mindlessly surfing the channels on satellite radio.” — Stanley Yuan
He’s not alone.
Americans spends more than 26.5 billion hours per year commuting and change radio stations 13,346,902,174,683,294,459,012,371* times (*best guesstimate).
It was time to do for spoken-word radio what Pandora had done for music — provide a totally personalized listening experience without the effort of personal curation.
But personalizing radio required five never-before-attempted steps:
- Analyze written content from more than 100 premium news outlets to identify trending stories across almost two dozen categories
- Staff newsroom of professional news narrators to create audio versions of top news stories from our premium content partners
- Transcribe, text mine and categorize every episode of every publicly available podcast as they become available (currently more than 35,000)
- Organize all of our audio stories based on a concept tree containing millions of interrelated terms
- Develop a proprietary algorithm capable of curating personalized, timed playlists of audio stories unique to each listener, every time they listen
Voila, meet Otto Radio!
Now anyone can get their personal front-page of news read to them and discover podcasts they love — all with the push of a button.
Otto Radio is live on Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and will be available via CarPlay and Android Auto in early 2017. But if Otto’s big green button is really going to rival the radio dial, we need to be available everywhere.
Enter Samsung — the company that sells more smartphones, appliances and televisions than any other company in the world, not to mention their ambitious push to connect cars and build the smartest automotive infotainment systems on wheels.
Next journey.
Samsung NEXT’s investment comes just as we’re launching our public “Otto Everywhere” API.
Now with just a few lines of code, automotive OEMs, smart device manufacturers and content distributors can provide their customers with audio content from top news outlets and podcast publishers at no cost.
Fortunately, we’ve found a partner that shares our vision for reinventing traditional radio and enriching the lives of millions of daily listeners no matter where the journey takes them.
Working together, we’ve got a clear road map to make it happen.
