A station without a mast.
Club radio, city station, niche channel. Permanent channel, rotating shows, one URL for the lifetime of your station. Listeners know the address, the program rotates.
What matters most.
Rotating shows
Monday morning show, Wednesday local desk, Friday DJ set. Channel stays, program rotates. Plan broadcasts ahead with weekday recurrence.
One permanent URL
Listeners bookmark once. Waiting screen between shows with cover and next slot. When you go live, listeners reconnect automatically.
Your own branding
Logo and description. Your brand on the listener side, not ours. Display name and org description editable any time.
A station is a schedule, not a stream.
Anyone can broadcast once. What makes something a station is that people know where it lives and roughly when things happen there. That means one address that never changes, a programme someone can look at, and something sensible on screen when nobody is on air, rather than a dead link that teaches listeners not to come back.
The waiting screen does more work than its name suggests. It is what a listener meets when they arrive twenty minutes early or three hours late, and it is the difference between a station that is currently between shows and a station that appears to be broken. Cover art, the name of what is next, and the past shows you have published turn an empty slot into a shelf.
Continuity matters more than polish for the same reason. A Monday show that goes out every Monday at the same address builds an audience faster than a better-produced show that appears whenever its presenter has time, because listeners are forming a habit and a habit needs something to attach to.
Music licensing is the part nobody plans for.
This is the honest one, and it catches new stations out repeatedly. If you play music you did not write, you generally need a licence from the relevant collecting societies, and that obligation sits with you as the broadcaster. It is not something a streaming platform grants you, and it does not become someone else's problem because the broadcast is online rather than over the air.
Which bodies apply depends entirely on where you are and who your listeners are. In Germany that conversation usually involves GEMA and GVL; in the UK, PRS and PPL; elsewhere the equivalents. Rates for small non-commercial webcasters are often far lower than people fear, and there are frequently specific tariffs for exactly this case, which is the good news buried under the paperwork.
Do it before launch, not after the first complaint. Speak-based programming, interviews, local news and licensed or rights-cleared music sidestep most of it. We are not able to give you legal advice on this, which is precisely why it belongs in your first week of planning rather than your first week on air.
Running a crew without a studio.
Community radio is usually a rotating group of volunteers rather than a staff, which means the constraint is coordination rather than equipment. Assign hosts and speakers per channel, so the Wednesday local desk can go on air without anyone handing over passwords, and so somebody leaving the crew does not take the station's access with them.
Presenters broadcast from wherever they are. Someone joining for one show gets a speak link, clicks it and is on air with nothing installed, which matters when your Friday guest is a councillor who will not be installing software for a twenty-minute interview.
The recurring quality problem is not the platform but the spread. Nine presenters means nine microphones, nine rooms and nine levels of care, and a listener notices the inconsistency far more than they notice any individual show being imperfect. The cheap fix is a shared rule everyone follows: a wired headset rather than laptop speakers, a soft room rather than a kitchen, and a level check before going on air.
Transmitters and servers against a browser.
How this compares with the two routes a community station usually considers. Note that the licensing obligation for the music you play is yours in every column.
| Criterion | OpenBooth | FM or DAB licence | Self-hosted stream |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadcast licence needed | No | Yes | No |
| Transmitter or server | Neither | Transmitter site | A server you maintain |
| Setup | An afternoon | Months | Days, plus sysadmin |
| Presenting from home | A link in the browser | Rarely | With extra software |
| Adding a presenter | A role or speak link | Studio access | Credentials to hand out |
| Schedule and waiting screen | Built in | Station systems | Build it yourself |
| Replaying past shows | Built in | Separate archive | Build it yourself |
| Multilingual listeners | Subtitles and translation | No | No |
| Who keeps it running | Nobody | Engineers | Whoever set it up |
| Music rights | Your responsibility | Your responsibility | Your responsibility |
Self-hosting remains the right answer if you want full control of the stack and have someone who genuinely enjoys maintaining it. The usual reason volunteer stations move away from it is that this person eventually leaves.
How to set it up.
- 01
Create the station channel
Channel name, URL slug, logo and cover. The slug is permanent, pick deliberately. Visibility public.
- 02
Invite the crew
Regular hosts and contributors via org invite as members. External voices via speak token, no account needed.
- 03
Set up the schedule
Pick date and time per show. Weekday recurrence for fixed slots. Listeners see the schedule in the waiting screen.
- 04
Show after show
Go live, end, next show. Channel stays, your audience builds up over the weeks.
Nine volunteers, one address.
Four shows a week, nobody in the same room, and a schedule that holds.
A neighbourhood station runs four shows a week: a Monday morning magazine, a Wednesday local desk covering council meetings, a Friday music slot and an irregular Sunday interview. Nine volunteers, none of them technical, none of them in the same building, and previously a self-hosted stream that worked until the one person who understood it moved away.
The station lives on a single channel with a permanent URL that has been on posters and in the local paper for two years. Volunteers are added as hosts or speakers, so the Wednesday pair can go on air without anyone sharing a password, and a volunteer who steps back simply loses their role.
Between shows the waiting screen carries the station logo, what is on next and the published archive, so somebody arriving on a Tuesday finds a shelf of past programmes rather than silence. The Friday interview guest, usually a local councillor or a shop owner, gets a speak link an hour ahead and joins from their own phone without installing anything.
Before launch the group spent a week on the part that was not technical at all: working out which collecting societies applied to the music on the Friday show and what the tariff was for a station their size. That turned out to be cheaper than expected and considerably cheaper than finding out later.
- Volunteers
- 9
- Shows per week
- 4
- Servers maintained
- 0
- Station URL
- Unchanged
Common questions.
Every station has a permanent public URL you can share anywhere, plus a listing on your organization's public page. Listeners bookmark the URL once and return to the same address for every show.
Related use cases.
Your station. Your program. Your community.
Permanent URL, your own branding, fixed schedule. Channel and broadcast-time limits vary by plan, see pricing for details.