Radioplayer sets standard for hybrid radio technology

Summary

Founded in 2010, Radioplayer is the broadcaster-owned platform that keeps live radio first, beautiful and seamless across connected cars, apps, speakers and TVs – supporting tens of thousands of stations worldwide as listening moves beyond the traditional dial.

Seeking to adapt to the shifting media landscape amid the rise of non-traditional platforms, the company partnered with Softwire to rebuild its cloud platform to improve performance, usability, costs and scalability. Focusing on implementing a serverless architecture on AWS, the project successfully enhanced global service delivery to ensure a high-quality listener experience – with a core focus on automotive partners – while laying critical foundations to support an ambitious growth strategy to maintain radio’s relevance in the modern age.

The challenge: modernising legacy infrastructure

Radioplayer required a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure to support global expansion, improve API response times, and ensure a smooth migration with minimal disruption to its 10,000+ stations. Key challenges included:

• Complex API structure with 80+ endpoints and incomplete documentation
• Traffic spikes up to 20.3 million requests per hour
• Seamless migration with minimal disruption to API consumers
• Reliable, reproducible environments for quick deployment

Short-term objective: foundations for operational excellence

Immediate goals were to improve operational efficiency, streamline development, reduce latency, optimise caching, and simplify endpoints. Key focus was applied to:

• Reducing Car OEM API latency through cloud integration
• Optimising services to reduce costs and improve service delivery

Long-term objective: global leadership in hybrid radio technology

Radioplayer’s long-term strategy focuses on enhancing platform usability with features such as audio stream validation tools, CMS management, bulk editing, performance monitoring, and scheduled station updates. These improvements aim to solidify Radioplayer’s position as the industry standard for hybrid radio technology.

Our approach

A technical audit identified five key improvement areas: insights, costs, updates, latency, and endpoint response times. This led to the technical scoping and initial specification development for the rebuild of the cloud platform, focusing on scalability and a unified API framework. An Agile methodology guided the project, with two-week sprints and regular communication to address issues and continually refine the scopes ongoing requirements.

Our estimation approach used two complementary metrics:

• Initial high-level estimates to establish baseline expectations and resource requirements
• Detailed story point estimations that evolved as we progressively scoped individual features

We monitored project progress and trajectory by continuously comparing these estimation approaches. This analysis helped us identify potential scope complexities, technical challenges, and timeline risks early in the development cycle – crucial for managing expectations and mitigating risks, allowing early input into specifications.

“The move to a serverless, fully-scripted cloud stack gives our team the velocity we need to innovate for broadcasters and automotive partners. Softwire helped us execute the migration without downtime, but most importantly, the new platform is now 100 % in our hands – ready for the next wave of hybrid-radio features.”

Pasquale Marinaro, Head of Technology, Radioplayer

Technical Solution

We developed a scalable serverless architecture hosted on AWS, integrating secure API layers and modular authentication to support global usage requirements – while ensuring high-throughput data capture even during peak usage periods, supporting critical service continuity.

A React-Admin interface (CMS) was also developed and hosted as a single-page app, connecting to the serverless backend via AWS Lambda functions.

The solution was managed as Infrastructure as Code, with AWS CloudFormation for configuration and AWS CodePipeline for automated deployment. A phased live release strategy included data migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL, a phased deployment, and rapid rollback capability to ensure smooth migration without service disruption

Inflight Challenges

• Scope – We identified several edge cases requiring backwards compatibility and determined that pausing the work for an extensive scoping investigation would impact critical deadlines. Instead, we were able to implement a more targeted, all-encompassing solution, refining the scope during testing by comparing it to the existing system. A response structure comparison tool was developed to facilitate this process, alongside robust data migration utilities and traffic mirroring for precise side-by-side analysis with the production system.
• Timeline – Within the first few weeks, we identified that the initial timeline was unrealistic due to scope complexity and new backwards compatibility requirements. To address this, we collaborated with Radioplayer to prioritise key features using MoSCoW workshops and increased our development team from 8 to 15 engineers, organising work into dedicated workstreams. Regular synchronisation meetings ensured alignment, and we replanned the project to establish a realistic baseline that aligned with both the project’s requirements and Radioplayer’s goals.
• Performance – The team implemented automated performance testing and custom caching strategies to validate stability and optimise response times.

“Despite the pressure, the Radioplayer team, supported by invaluable input from Softwire and our other technical partners, demonstrated remarkable perseverance and professionalism throughout the process.”

Bill Best, Technical Solutions Manager, Radioplayer

Outcomes

• Migration of 80+ API endpoints across five versions, surpassing performance expectations with over 5,000 requests per second at peak (exceeding the target of 1,300 uncached requests per second by 200)
• A cross-functional team increased development velocity by 2.3x.
• AWS Lambda’s serverless architecture supported dynamic scaling, reducing costs and improving resilience during traffic spikes.
• AWS CloudFormation and CI/CD pipelines allowed rapid environment recreation and code deployment, ensuring consistency and reliability.
• Definition and implementation of the Google Media Actions feed that provides Google with Station metadata, enabling Radioplayer to become the default provider of Radio station metadata for Google Assistant worldwide.

Future Roadmap & Strategic Partnership

With Cloud 2.0 established, we are exploring future possibilities through upcoming strategic roadmap and API strategy workshops, aligning goals and prioritising innovative ideas, including:

• Developing AI-Driven Social Media Prototypes: Streamlining and accelerating content generation from audio podcasts, rapidly developed into a working proof of concept in under 3 weeks.
• Strategic Goals: Continuous enhancement of platform usability and API refinements to solidify Radioplayer’s industry leadership.

Ready for the new era of media

The Cloud 2.0 platform positions Radioplayer for growth, enabling it to handle high levels of requests and support rapid deployment. The organisation is now primed to broaden its reach and service offerings to broadcasters, adding much needed and timely value to the radio industry. This transformation ensures Radioplayer is adaptable to future client and technological needs, strengthening its position in the automotive and other streaming sectors.