Multi-site coordination

About FunX
FunX is Dutch national public radio station with localised programmes for four of the country’s major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. FunX focuses on young adults using an offline and online multi-channel strategy..

FunX is a Dutch public radio station which has been on the air since august 2002. The station aims to give airtime to opinions from the street and follows the latest trends. FunX airs from four different cities, using cloud collaboration.

Jeroen Leering: ‘For a radio station and for me, as Head of IT, there are three things that are very important. Stability, 24/7 performance and redundancy. And that’s why we decided to have a central database and a separate storage server in each city.’

When FunX designed the system, the connection between the cities didn’t allow you to work from a central storage solution due to latency issues. For DJ’s and editors these kinds of delay are unacceptable. When you open the fader the audio should play immediately.

FunX needed cloud collaboration to connect four cities. And with OmniPlayer they built their own private cloud with fast and reliable audio synchronization, using standard IT equipment. The heart of the system is in Rotterdam where the central database is hosted. The chosen architecture gives FunX the flexibility they need. During peak hours the local studios take over, and during the night and non-peak hours one central playlist is being aired from Rotterdam.

Jeroen Leering: ‘This solution gives our DJs and reporters a lot of freedom. They can work from any of the four locations.’