New Level Radio Standardizes on Barix Audio over IP Devices to Deliver Branded “Retail Radio” Stations to Stores in Two States

Barix AG, a pioneer in IP-based audio, intercom, control, and monitoring, announces that New Level Radio has standardized on Barix Exstreamer IP audio decoders to deliver custom, branded “retail radio” stations to retailers, restaurants and other consumer-oriented businesses across Hawaii and Colorado.  The complete solution provides a point-to-multipoint radio broadcast service over reliable IP connections, minimizing implementation costs and system complexity for both New Level Radio and its clients.
 
New Level Radio currently broadcasts to more than 50 stores in Hawaii and Colorado, including a variety of retail and restaurant chains such as Teddy’s Bigger Burgers, Pictures Plus, Pricebusters, Hilo Hattie’s, and the Royal Hawaiian Center, an upscale outdoor shopping mall in the heart of Waikiki.  The service provides live audio direct to the stores, providing a mix of music, advertising and promotional material to customers at the point of purchase.  All programming is custom-designed for each business, produced at New Level Radio’s studios in Hawaii, and delivered to stores over a reliable IP network.  Barix Exstreamer-100 devices receive and decode the audio at each store location, and interface with store PA systems to broadcast high-quality audio over loudspeakers.
 
“The Barix Exstreamer-100 devices are feature-rich yet affordable for us, which allows us to keep the installation costs low for our clients,” said Nathan Green, Vice President and Director of Sales for New Level Radio.  “There is no requirement to install satellite dishes on the roof at participating stores, and no burden on our customers to change CDs or switch through a satellite package to update the program.  Once the Barix device is programmed with an IP address and installed at the store, we can remotely update the program and maintain it on the fly.”
Kent Untermann, President of Pictures Plus, an art and framing store with eight store locations, believes that the concept of branded retail radio delivers a unique experience for both its customers and employees.
 
“It is our belief that the best advertising we have is the people in our store,” said Untermann.  “As business owners, we spend a lot of time concentrating on getting people into our stores and forgetting about the opportunities that exist with customers already there.  The New Level Radio program delivers excellent audio quality to our customers inside the store and also delivers our business message to employees very effectively.  This is all part of the experience.”
 
Ted Tsakiris, Co-CEO of Teddy’s Bigger Burgers, operates three corporate locations in Hawaii.  The business will open its first franchise location in March, with plans to open stores in Japan later this year.  Tsakiris is currently using the New Level Radio platform in his corporate stores and will incorporate the program into franchise stores.
 
“The New Level Radio program is ultra-custom and very fluid, and we can update and edit the program with a simple request,” said Tsakiris.  “Our guests are entertained and informed about Teddy’s Bigger Burgers, who we are, where we came from, and where we are going as a company.”
 
New Level Radio provides new programs monthly and automatically updates them at the store side using the Barix Exstreamer platform.  Programs vary in length based on the hours of operation of each store and the retail business model.  Among the more unique customers, according to Green, is Dole Plantation, the second-most visited destination in Hawaii with more than one million people passing through every year.
 
“The program we have created for Dole is ‘The Plantation Station,’ and there are seven or eight vendors in this facility that participate in the advertising portion of this program,” said Green.  It’s a win-win because the client can offset some of the costs with help from the vendors, and each participating vendor is getting exposure by promoting their products at the point of purchase.”
 
Tens of thousands of Exstreamer IP audio decoders are now active within in-store audio platforms in the U.S. and Europe to deliver music, advertising and promotional messages from one-to-many locations — often as a reliable and cost-effective alternative to satellite delivery platforms.  Failover options provide redundancy for in-store playback directly from the Exstreamer in the event the live streaming content is temporarily offline.  Barix Exstreamer devices support mp3 playback; the company recently announced support of and aacPlus v1 and v2 codecs in its 2009 models.  aacPlus compression provides improved audio quality and/or a reduction in bandwidth costs.
 
All Barix products are inexpensive, low-power devices that are scalable to the growth of the operation; offer reliability through a PC-FREE design with no moving parts; and serve as a flexible platform for integration into virtually any operation requiring audio transport and delivery.  Barix also offers its programmable BCL standard open to all customers to easily tailor applications for specific needs.  Local control, audio relay, and low-latency streaming are a few examples of custom programs using Barix’s BCL software environment.