AirKast To Provide Free Alexa Skills to 800 North American Radio Stations/Hosts

AirKast To Provide Free Alexa Skills to 800 North American Radio Stations/Hosts

Unique Functionality Will Help Sell Mobile Ad Campaigns, Drive Listener Engagement

Pleasanton, CA, August 18, 2017 -- AirKast Inc., a leader in mobile app development for broadcasters and media companies, announced today that it has developed and will be providing free Alexa skills for all its customers -- including over 800 North American radio stations, syndicated radio hosts and podcasters -- so they can bring compelling voice interaction to their audiences.  Beyond the basic launching of radio music streams, AirKast’s unique Alexa skills will enable listeners to explore, interact and request other content from stations and hosts available through their own branded mobile apps.

Most critically, AirKast will be providing a unique functionality that will now allow those stations and hosts to collect and harness permission-based user data to help them sell mobile ad campaigns and drive listener engagement beyond current levels.

New Alexa Skills Will Help Enrich Personal Connections with Radio Audiences

 “We expect that these new Alexa skills will be quite beneficial to radio stations -- by permitting them to forge easy-to-use personal connections with their audiences, and by giving them new content whenever and wherever they want it," explained AirKast CEO Larry Leung.  "It’s our mission to not only provide basic Alexa skills, but also more advanced voice recognition, so fans can interact with a radio station’s podcasts, show schedules and other application-based content,” he added.  "The radio industry is excited to see the resurgence of ‘at home’ audio usage as it's been competing with other digital music services." 

"The effort to deploy Alexa skills is so minimal, it makes perfect sense to offer it free of charge," Leung stressed.

AirKast also offers Apple Car Play and Android Auto functionality for free -- which will be relaunched with auto voice controls -- and believes Alexa voice commands will significantly enhance that experience. 

Additional New AirKast Features Released

AirKast is releasing other new features for customers, including: advance push notifications, which include the ability to launch geo-targeted messaging for programming and sales; multi-language support; intelligent message scheduling; segmentation opt-in/opt-outs; visual mobile listening heat maps that can help identify user activity down to the local county level; breaking news and weather alerts; and live in-app video streaming support. 

“We’ve also added live in-app video support to recapture the attention of our customer’s branded audiences," said AirKast VP of Engineering Hung Nguyen.  "Currently, many radio stations drive their audiences to third-party video sites, like Facebook, YouTube and Periscope, and we want our customers to be able to bring their audiences back to their own broadcast and branded environment -- so they can start to measure and monetize their live video efforts.”

“AirKast is committed to providing data that can  help our customers make better business decisions and, most crucially, that can directly help drive radio sales and programming results,” he added.

AirKast is a category leader that works with over 60 media companies -- including CBS Radio News, Fox Radio News and Cumulus Media -- as well as syndicated show personalities like Mark Levin.  AirKast uses its proprietary “AirBridge” platform and “Air Connectors” to create mobile applications that are used for listening and interacting with radio station streams and advertisings.

About AirBridge and TuneKast

AirBridge, the industry's award-winning hosted digital media delivery platform created by AirKast, is used to build enterprise-class mobile applications that are reliable, secure and scalable so companies can target large audiences that require simultaneous access. AirBridge currently supports market-leading mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, Kindle and Android. Designed for terrestrial and Internet-based radio stations to increase AQH, TuneKast is a mobile application framework that features real-time digital media and online content within branded mobile applications.  Please visit www.airkast.com