Back in February 2009, I proposed to make an iPhone application for VPRO, one of the Dutch public broadcasters. What I was particularly interested in their Luisterpaal “music announcement platform”. It’s basically a web site with a selection of the latest, released and unreleased music albums on it. Every few days, old content is removed and new content is added. Anyone can listen to it for free, through a Flash player in a browser, check it out at http://3voor12.vpro.nl/luisterpaal/
I like the Luisterpaal service a lot, but what annoyed me was that I had to sit behind a computer to use it. So my proposal was to develop a dedicated, native iPhone player that would connect to their existing Flash media servers. I wrote a proof-of-concept app to showcase my skills as freelance iPhone developer, and also to investigate the (im)possibilities of parsing the Flash audio streams to something the iPhone can play back.
VPRO reacted very welcoming to my proposal and they accepted my offer to develop the Luisterpaal iPhone App for them as a freelance consultant.
The first version of the Luisterpaal iPhone app was released in the first weekend of August 2009. It was an instant hit as it rose to the 2nd place in the App Store rankings in less than 48 hours. It has been downloaded an incredible amount of times and is listened to for many hours a day by its users.