I was sitting on hold the other day with one of my clients, while I was on hold, I was listening to a local radio station playing. Then it struck me, there is already a market for “on-hold music” distributed via USB drives and other sources, why not a online radio station that is geared specifically for local businesses that plays ads for various businesses in the area. For just for say $50/month, they would get an ad and it would be put in the “virtual” playlist. And using open source software like Airtime from SourceFabric one could actually do this fairly in expensively. A couple of key thoughts to do this right though.
- Must be high quality ads. Using professionals would be a good way to go. Get some sound clips of these professionals and test it yourself.
- Bandwidth could be a potential issue, so make sure you have enough.
- Some research would need to be done to find a device that could translate the radio stream into a format that the onsite PBX could understand.
All in all, this could be fairly easy to implement.