Public Radio Exchange

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The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is a nonprofit web-based platform for digital distribution, review, and licensing of radio programs. The organization claims to be the largest on-demand catalog of public radio programs available for broadcast and Internet use.[1]

According to PRX's site, its mission "is to build a fair market for creative audio content and an online community of increasing gains; to create more opportunities for diverse programming of exceptional quality, interest, and importance to reach more listeners."[2]

The company enables terrestrial radio stations to audition pieces and download broadcast-quality audio to share with their listeners over the air or online. PRX catalogs thousands of pieces and allows users to search by topic, length, format, tone and time of the year.

The site also provides a community space open to public radio listeners, producers and stations, where users can discover, rate and review pieces. In addition to providing feedback, the rating system brings work to the attention of stations, who are able to sort pieces by their rating. When a piece is licensed by a station PRX provides the producer with a royalty.

PRX provides stations and producers with tools to manage and monitor transactions, rights, usage statistics and payments within their individual and group accounts.

On February 28, 2007 PRX and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced the Public Radio Talent Quest[3]. This competition is an open search for new public radio talent, and gives producers the chance to produce a pilot show for public radio. Finalists will be chosen after a five round competition voted on by fans, public radio professionals and celebrity judges.

On May 14th, 2007 the first round of submissions ended with 1,452 entries. As of May 22nd, 2007, the Public Radio Talent Quest site has over 14,600 registered users.

On April 9th, 2008 The MacArthur Foundation selected PRX as one of its 2008 recipients of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

[edit] Background

The PRX site and services launched in September 2003 after a two-year planning, research, and development phase supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation. Since then PRX has received additional support from the NTIA Technology Opportunities Program, the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Surdna Foundation, and Google Grants. PRX offices are located in Cambridge, MA.

[edit] Numbers

As of May 22, 2007 PRX has 12,167 available radio pieces, 28,149 members, including 445 radio stations, [4] and 2,782 individual producers [5]

[edit] Programs distributed by PRX

Some notable programs distributed on PRX include:

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Station Resource Group 2006 Activity Review
  2. ^ Introduction to the Public Radio Exchange
  3. ^ Corporation for Public Broadcasting press release
  4. ^ PRX Station search
  5. ^ PRX Producer search.