Dreamware / Work / MoreFM Auckland: Radio's Digital Emergence
MoreFM Auckland: Radio's Digital Emergence
John Jansen built the digital platform for MoreFM Auckland's move onto the web, work recognised by the NZ Herald in their coverage of radio's transition to the internet age.
The Challenge
In the late 1990s, radio was a purely analogue medium. Stations broadcast over FM, listeners tuned in with physical radios, and the relationship between broadcaster and audience was entirely one-way. New Zealand's dominant broadcaster, The Radio Network, saw no advantage in going online — its CEO publicly stated he couldn't figure out how to sell "a small, scattered, global audience to local advertisers."
CanWest, anchored by Auckland's MoreFM, took the opposite view. John Jansen was brought on as Internet Architecture Manager for MoreFM Auckland, tasked with building the digital infrastructure for CanWest's push into online radio. The brief wasn't just to build a website — it was to pioneer an entirely new way for radio stations to interact with their audiences, at a time when most of the industry thought the internet was irrelevant to broadcasting.
Our Approach
John Jansen designed and built the interactive web platforms for MoreFM Auckland, Channel Z, and several other CanWest properties. The work went far beyond static websites — these were interactive platforms with real-time audience engagement, streaming infrastructure, and data collection capabilities that gave radio stations their first real tools for understanding listener behaviour at scale.
The technical challenge involved building for the severe constraints of the era: dial-up connections, early browsers, and the fundamental question of how to stream audio to audiences when bandwidth was scarce. John's work on multicasting — the one-to-many broadcasting model — was central to solving this, drawing on techniques first developed for the New York Stock Exchange's intranet.
A parallel project for Christchurch DJ Melanie Wise (melanie.co.nz) demonstrated the power of web-based audience interaction. JJ built a real-time voting and competition platform that replaced the traditional phone-and-fax model with web-based participation. The system handled promotions where listeners voted directly on the website, with the data collected (with permission) used to fine-tune programming and events.
The Outcome
The results were significant by any measure. MoreFM Auckland's site attracted approximately 100,000 visits per month from 20,000 listeners. Channel Z performed even better with 200,000 visits from 70,000 unique visitors — a combined total of around 300,000 visits from 90,000 people monthly across just two stations. As John Jansen told the NZ Herald: "It may not yet equal traditional radio reach, but it is certainly reach."
The melanie.co.nz platform registered more than 90,000 votes in a single day — remarkable for a city the size of Christchurch — and across three radio stations, the voting technology processed over 1 million votes in its first year of trials.
The work was recognised in two major publications. Peter Sinclair wrote in the NZ Herald (November 28, 2000) in "Radio's Up With The Play," describing John as "the enthused — and enthusing — internet architecture manager of Auckland's More FM and a driving force behind CanWest's colonisation of online radiospace." Jason Kemp wrote in Unlimited Magazine (January 29, 2001) in "A Parallel Dimension," calling JJ "the whizz from prototype.co.nz" and noting that the technology pioneered in these projects pointed toward the future of online voting and audience engagement.
MoreFM Auckland won Station of the Year at the 2000 NZ Radio Awards during this period of digital innovation. CanWest's digital presence was described by the NZ Herald as "this country's most vital online radio presence" — while New Zealand's largest broadcaster had no online presence at all.
Key result
300,000 monthly visits, Station of the Year 2000 NZ Radio Awards, NZ Herald + Unlimited Magazine coverage
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