Pop-up players to be a thing of the past

I’ve been thinking a lot about web audio players lately. Working for a radio station I’ve had to deal with live web streaming audio for a long time, but not since we put efforts in CAVEradio had I really thought about getting creative with the typical pop-up audio player. As I use CAVEradio as my guinea pig I’m starting to consider skipping the pop-up player entirely.

Post radio stations and streaming places have pop-up players. You click the button and a new window opens up, usually quite a bit smaller than a normal web page. The intent of these players is to be just that - a player - without much else. You’ll hear an advertisement, maybe make a few customization choices and then the player ends up minimized or out of focus. That pop-up player acts like a normal radio: out of sight, out of mind and in the background.

When we started CAVEradio we included a real-time chat along with the pop-up player. The chat is a critical part of the show as we use the banter there to see what people want to talk about and get their reactions to what we’re talking about. It’s an invaluable tool that provides instant (free) feedback. I kept thinking about what more I could add to the pop-up player that would keep people engaged with what we’re talking about and perhaps promote more conversation topics. We’ve tried real time polls, call-in links, and the standard Twitter feed…and all of it worked pretty well.

So I took that proof of concept to work and after some heavy convicing got a real-time chat added to our live player…and it’s been going really well. Unfortunately our on-air staff doesn’t use the chat as a part of the show, it’s treated more as a bell and whistle, but after two weeks of action the feedback for the chat is all positive. And because the chat is integrated with the live player, users are “forced” to see advertisements and other content - and they even talk about it!

Now that The Bosses seem to like this trick I’m starting to think about what else we can add to not only engage listeners but also get more sales dollars. All the ideas we’ve come up with are great and nifty but I run into a constant problem - screen real estate.

Most pop-up players are 800×600 or smaller but only because they are always treated as background objects. Now that we have an audience engaged with the player itself does it really need to be in a small pop-up player? I don’t think so.

If people are no longer treating the player as a background object, why should we? Moving the player to a full-sized page will only increase what type of content and features we can add. Of course, giving them a pop-up player option is smart and easy, but if we force feed them the full page we have a better chance of getting more out of the audience, for both fortune and glory.

I’ll of course do some experimentation with CAVEradio first and get some valuable (and smart) feedback from my own audience before I drag the ideas to the work place. It’s amazing how a mere 300 pixels can change an entire product.