SHER: The Decentralized Audio Platform

The Mission & Motivation

We believe great content is everywhere and stunning creators can be found anywhere around the globe. We are witnessing a page shift in the media industry. The way we consume news, the way we entertain ourselves, all of this is changing.

We believe great content is everywhere and stunning creators can be found anywhere around the globe.

Many companies, including the big ones, are working on their own alternatives to mass media broadcasting platforms. Some of them try, only to later ditch their efforts. But there is always something lacking. Perhaps, there is no replacement for traditional TV or radio as we know it. Perhaps, we can take a different direction.

A recent “big thing” is a conversational application, making it easy to stream voice content and putting dialogue at the centre. Simple and direct but at the same time, lacking in some angles.

We want to focus on audio streaming and how we can make it better.

Last month, thanks to the twitter tide effect, this article by Helen Li appeared on our radar. The article describes how different is the ecosystem of Chinese podcasts apps in comparison with the US.
As Li mentions, these apps are not just for searching and discovering podcasts. They add a massive interaction layer. You can do things like take notes, comment and react, among others.
These features make these apps quite rich in fact. Making listeners more active participants or perhaps making the show something that they can mold and take with them somehow. We plan to write more about the kind of interactions we'd like to have in a future post.
For now, we want to put emphasis on this idea: that audio platforms can be more than just search and discover.

With SHER we want to add some form of experience to your favorite shows and help everybody become part of the content creation journey.

This is our main motivation, to empower creators. We are doing this with a powerful platform using a decentralized content distribution model, but this is just the first step.
The interactive layer is also something that we aim to improve. And that would be our next step.

This is our main motivation, to empower creators.

In the next section we provide details about our current status and main focus these days.

Current Status

SHER as an idea is a way to broadcast conversations, news, shows, productions. - where are we today? What can a little company based in Argentina do in this context?

We first focused on the content distribution. Based on our experience we decided to make a risky move (there is always a bit of risk in fun and exciting approaches, right?) and create a decentralized platform.
Just putting a platform on its feet is a lot of work. Imagine now bootstrapping a decentralized one, let’s say it adds a little bit more spice to the recipe. Anyway, we knew that a decentralized platform could give us a lot of fuel to create massive broadcasting networks. After a year of work we believe we are getting there with the kind of infrastructure that we imagined.

SHER runs on top of a data channel and an audio channel. The data channel is used to share some contextual information between streamers, operators and listeners. It also represents the foundation for the interactive layer. The audio channel is the high quality encoded conversation. Both of these run through decentralized technology.

A note about roles in SHER. In the last paragraph we mention different roles: streamers (in plural, yes) and listeners. We are familiar with these, we’ve been on one side or another. But what about “operators”? They are a core part of our vision. Operators open the streaming game to more than one person, alleviates streamers' pressure to handle everything and being live at the same time, giving the show more control and quality. They can manage files, control volumes and general output and coordinate with new streamers in the room. And this is only the beginning.

Our next move was to start talking with content creators. We started reaching people and scheduling interviews. This is a great way to validate and tune features.
This is also a work in progress, we are still looking for creators and journalists with a passion for sharing their voice and ideas. As a result, the technology is in place, and we are optimizing for our (beta) launch.

If SHER sounds appealing to you, drop us a line here. 🎧

Coming Next

Now we are preparing everything to share our first program schedule with you. We hope you will give them a warm welcome.

There is more to share. There will be more of SHER before the end of the year. But I can say no more. 🙊

Don’t forget to stay tuned on twitter to get the latest updates.

Thanks for reading and remember: It’s fresh, it’s SHER. 😉

🖤 SHER Team

PS: Thank you very much Chris for your help with the proofreading process! ✌️