Programmes will focus on local news
Thames Valley: River Radio aims to grow audience on DAB
A radio station covering the Thames Valley has launched on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) – with hopes to get a daily audience of 100,000.
River Radio launched in March last year, created by directors Sam Sethi and Michael Bourton. It has more than 30 show presenters, with more than 20 subject-focused talk shows.
It covers a variety of local topics such as arts, fitness, wellbeing, and food; and local events, politics, businesses, schools, bands and sports.
River Radio also runs traditional daily breakfast and drive home shows. Each week, the Advertiser presents a news round-up, live on a Thursday at 9am.
Radio stations that broadcast
on the FM signal are limited in their transmission range (less than 5km) and audience reach.
At the moment, River Radio has 10,000 unique listeners and is hoping to get up to 100,000 daily listeners.
It has already seen a 112 per cent rise in the week since launching on DAB,
Sam says.
“We recognised that there was no DAB commercial radio station across Berkshire and that surprised us,” he said.
“You can’t do it on day one, you have to grow the radio station. That took us most of last year because of COVID.”
Though River Radio has ‘a massive footprint, from Andover up to Oxford’, its purpose is to create a ‘hyper-local’ show that talks about towns like Maidenhead and Windsor specifically than ‘generic all area’ news.
River Radio operates more in a podcast format, helping it go digital.
“We’ve got hour-long podcasts with sponsorship that is part of the show rather than three-hour radio shows, broken up with traditional radio advertising,” said Sam.
“We have 25 podcasts that happen to be broadcast live.
It’s very deliberate that we
created podcasts first.”
River Radio has now been officially awarded its Ofcom licence.
Moving forward, it aims to attend about 15 big upcoming events such as Pub in the Park
and Let’s Rock the Moor.
River Radio is also hoping to forge more partnerships with local businesses.
The station’s full schedule is available on its website at river.radio/live-schedule