Radio Garden
Radio Garden is a non-profit Dutch radio and digital research project developed from 2013 to 2016 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, by the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and five other European universities.
In 2016 it provided access to nearly 8,000 radio stations and The Radio Conference 2016: Transnational Encounters said that it went viral. The service reported a collection of over 40,000 stations in 2024.
Operation and functionality
The site interface shows a rotatable representation of the globe, with stations listed on clicking a location. The service is comparable in some ways to earlier long-distance shortwave listening, but stations are streamed using data packets instead of broadcast by radio waves.The home page, titled "Live", allows the user to explore the world, listening to what local stations are broadcasting at the time, with information on the country the signal is being transmitted from.
In 2018, native apps for IOS and Android were launched. In 2019, a search function was added so users could search for any station on the site by name or location.
Concept and design
Within Radio Garden, radios are arranged by geolocation and grouped by cities. According to specialized websites, the design is formed by greenish spheres superimposed on the map, which increases in size as the region's number of broadcasters available.This idea was developed by the companies Studio Puckey and Studio Moniker in partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
On 14 March 2020 a new version, with upgraded features, was released.