Survey Results 2019
- May 5, 2019
- 2 min read
First of all, a word of thanks to all of you who took the time to complete our survey ahead of the 2019 season.
After five years of commentary, I've grown up with this service, and feel like the service has grown itself,. After contingency plans fell through, unfortunately we had to suspend the service while I was away. It's been a fantastic eight months of travel, visiting places I never thought I'd get to, but I definitely have a renewed enthusiasm heading into 2019, to take Rebel Radio in a new, more professional direction.
When I first mused the idea of the radio to Éanna Buckley, I envisaged a commentary for City fans, capable of rivalling what local radio stations could achieve, with far less resources. I had imagined it to be a completely straight-faced, professional production - but as with all things, it grew its own legs and morphed its own semi-professional, light-hearted personality.
One of the key things people have commented is a need to strip back the non-essential chat, and focus more on the football at hand. This is certainly something which RR has needed to improve on, and I will be changing the style of the commentaries over the next six months or so for the season.
Another key finding of the survey is the need to improve our sound quality. We have gone to great lengths to improve the quality last year, buying new, uniform headsets, and spending extra time before games to do proper sound checks.
One of the big problems we had last year was with our radio commentary website, playing old recordings, having to delete the cache and refreshing, all nonsense which made it more difficult to enjoy our service.
Therefore, we have taken the lead of other commentary services - such as Between the Stripes and Ronán McCarthy down in Wexford - to make the switch to Mixlr, which allows radio hosting for up to three hours at a time, and automatically records all broadcasts.
This is a paid service, but we believe it will be worthwhile in the long term.
It also has a live chat feature which we will be trialling, and we hope people can use responsibly. Our first ever radio broadcast on the Setanta Cup turned into sectarian, racist chaos, and we had to sadly immediately shut it down.
We are also looking into the possibility of purchasing a small, portable mixing desk, to improve the consistency of quality, and also make our lives easier, particularly with just one person commentating.
It's great however to see so many long-term listeners, and people who don't just appreciate our service, but consider it to be of a good quality. Many thanks to all of you who left kind comments in the last two questions, knowing people listen and enjoy the service is our sole motivator.
Depending on our resources moving further into the season, we'll look at the possibility of expanding into further services as detailed in the survey, we will have our first Patreon exclusive extended podcast very soon!
I have left the full survey results below for anybody who would like a further insight.
City till I Die,
Kevin Galvin.
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