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 (under the supervision of Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg's Golo Föllmer), by the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and five other European universities. In 2016 it provided access to nearly 8,000 radio stations^[1] and The Radio Conference 2016: Transnational Encounters said that it went viral.^{[citation needed]} The service reported a collection of over 40,000 stations in 2024.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.

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.^[4]

On 14 March 2020 a new version, with upgraded features, was released.

The site adopted the generic .garden top-level domain, which was originally intended for gardening professionals and, as noted on specialized websites, the interface supports any browser and resolution. For transmission, the signal generated by the broadcaster must be converted from radio to a stream. The service requires an Internet connection. Supported conversion formats for streaming are MP3, Ogg and AAC.

Radio Garden has been banned in Turkey since January 2022 upon the request of Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), ordering Radio Garden to pay the license fee or to terminate their service in Turkey.^[5]

In late September/early October 2022, Radio Garden limited UK listeners to UK-only channels. The message "Stations outside the UK temporarily unavailable" can be seen at the bottom left of the screen. Most BBC Radio stations were also removed from the site, with the notable exception of the BBC World Service.

In January 2023, a further announcement was added to the site:^[6]

"Dear listener, As you may have noticed, access to international radio stations (meaning: stations outside the United Kingdom) has been restricted for users of Radio Garden in the United Kingdom. This restriction (due to licensing reasons) was initially referred to as a temporary measure, but unfortunately the restriction must be extended for an indefinite period due to copyright and neighbouring rights related matters that require clarification. Considering our main goal of providing our listeners a 'global' radio experience, it goes without saying that we strongly regret that we had to take this step."

As a consequence of this restriction, UK users who had paid for removal of advertising from 2022 onwards were offered a refund until December 2023.

• Official website