About

ABOUT

LEARN MORE ABOUT CALIOPE

About

Caliope develops software for radio stations, TV channels and in-store companies. With an agile, international and dedicated team we work hard on our products:

  • OnAir TV is our MAM, Scheduling and EPG software for TV channels.
  • OnAir Radio is our fully integrated radio automation system.
  • OnAir In-Store is our solution for companies that want to provide background music services.
  • OnAir Spots is our software to schedule commercials.

Custom media projects

Besides our products we do media related projects for our clients. We can add specific modules, add new interfaces and we can develop custom media applications.

See our Custom-made media software page or Contact us if you are interested in our customization services.

Our goal

Our goal is simple: we want to make the best software for media companies. We want to make software that makes media operations more efficient, we want to make media software that is user-friendly, stable, flexible and technical advanced. With other words: We want to provide you with the media software that will really help you to operate your business efficiently.

We also want to be a company which is nice to do business with. We listen to our clients, we keep our promises and will always do our best to give a good service.

We can summarize that in a single simple sentence:

Provide the best media software

Our principles

In order to reach the goal of making the best media software we have defined a set of principles to work with:

1. Know the business

In order to make software for the media industry, it is necessary to know the business. What do our clients need now and what do they need in the future? We will always have an eye on the future and will be among the first to implement new features.

2. Strive for a high degree of automation

We strive to automate as many processes as possible. Users should not do tasks that can be automated, nor should they do unnecessary configurations.

3. Focus on user-friendliness

The software should be user-friendly.
This is easy to say, but not so easy to accomplish. To reach this goal we always keep a quote of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in mind:

“Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher”.
(Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.)

During the development proces we continually have a look at each button, each function, each color and ask ourselves if it is really necessary, if it cannot be made simpler and if users will understand it immediately.
The result of this process are clean systems with no unnecessary buttons and no abundance of colors that are easy to operate and easy to understand.

4. Always use modern tools

We will always use modern tools. This seems obvious, but if we would neglect to evaluate and update our set of tools on a regular basis, we would end up with a legacy database, development tools that are only known by retired developers and software that would work best on an end-of-life Operating System.

5. Never be satisfied

We will always look if the software can be improved. Software always can be made faster, more user-friendly or more stable. It is an endless, challenging but satisfying quest to improve our software.

Reliable software company

We aim to be a reliable software company. We believe that a reliable software company should fulfil some basic requirements regarding its products and services.

1. Provide a manual

We believe that providing a manual is prerequisite of any serious software company. It not only helps the clients, it also avoids spending precious time on answering the same question again. Time which could be better used for developing better products.

2. Publish release notes (with a release date)

Release notes should always be published at any new release. Without release notes clients do not know what has changed and cannot anticipate on these changes. Release dates are important so you can check how many updates are released and when the last update was provided.

3. Use a good ticketing system

A good ticketing system is indispensable if you want to keep track of customers requirements. It will also avoid that customers do not know what happens to their bugs or requirements.

4. Release updates on a regular basis.

Regular updates are necessary not only to solve issues, but also to avoid that new versions contain so many changes that all these changes will introduce a lot of new bugs. Software development should be evolutionary.

Chose your software partner wisely

Professional software is an investment in the future. It will cost you money and time to implement and you will probably work with the software for many years. If you are looking for new professional software we advise you not only to look at the software itself, but also take the above 4 points into consideration. Try to be critical and always ask why a software company does not meet the 4 requirements that many professionals would consider to be a bare minimum.

History

The roots of Caliope go way back to the 90’s when a few radio-stations in The Netherlands started using a custom-made DOS based radio automation software system that was capable of handling editions (broadcasting different commercials in different regions).

The amount of radio stations that used the software grew and so Caliope grew. The DOS version was converted to a Windows version and more and more options were added while the amount of clients also grew.

In the 2010’s a MAM and scheduling system for TV (OnAir TV) was added, mainly aimed at TV music channels. With the growing amount of clients for the OnAir TV, more options were added. Nowadays, OnAir TV is a multi-purpose MAM and scheduling software system for all kind of TV channels.

Later an in-store module was added to the portfolio of Caliope, making Caliope a true media software company with clients all over the world.