ACI Radio

ACI Radio has been a project for a long time in ACI. When the idea of opening up school’s own radio station came up couple of years ago, the technology and internet did not make it any easy. It was extremely hard to get an FM radio station as a school — with no aim to make money out of it, so the only solution was making it online. One of the students created an iOS app as an ITGS internal assessment, which was an amazing idea but the app left with him when he graduated. Nobody was able to edit it or update it to the new trends and standards.

It was 2017, the students wanted to open up a radio club. Previous years ACI Radio club was playing music all around the campus on lunch breaks, but students didn’t seem to like it. They wanted to have their radio station, but didn’t know how. That year TuneIn app was very popular so we set up our own streaming server and sent the stream to TuneIn. That was a huge success because having the radio on such a popular platform was enough to drive students to make programs, podcasts, live shows and music sessions. It was until this year when TuneIn app was blocked in Turkey.

In 2018, we were desperate due to the fact that we didn’t have a proper platform where we can stream our radio. However we also had noticed a couple of problems so far:

• The concept of radio is not popular among students; teenagers; the new generation.
• They used streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music to listen to their favorite tunes. They didn’t listen to any radio!
• We had some loyal listeners who used TuneIn app, but we lost them when the app was blocked.
• Creating a website for the radio was an option, but we couldn’t tell people to go to our website just to listen to our favorite playlists.

We needed to fix these problems we had seen, but we only focused on one thing as it’s hard to change people’s behavior. We needed our own app in both Play Store and AppStore to get people to listen to our radio.

So we made one. We will not be talking about how we developed our own app as this piece of article is not about developing, but we can show you what it is!

Our app has three sections:

• Radio
• Soundgarden Live
• Podcasts

In radio section, you can listen to our favorite playlists that we try to create everyday. We advertise our playlists on our instagram page. When we go live, you can also hear us on the radio.

Soundgarden Club plays live on campus every Tuesday, so we wanted to include their live performance to our app. However it’s still under development as we need to create another streaming server dedicated only to them.

Podcasts is about students’ podcasts. Students are talking about music, films, art and many more. You can always listen to them whenever you want, as they work as regular podcasts do.

The app is made with ❤️ by students in acigarage.