The national broadcaster All India Radio (AIR) is catching up with time and technology. The broadcaster is making this happen by taking introducing their SoundCloud account. This will allow listeners to download and listen to the latest AIR news and news based programmes. The audio distribution platform will also have archival speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.

Currently, the AIR team has been feeding the platform with continuous audio files on regular intervals. At the moment, the platform has six playlists- 'Archives', 'Spotlight', 'Evening News', 'Mid-Day News', 'Daily News Bulletin 8:15am' and 'Parikrama' (segment in AIR). More playlists will be added eventually.

AIR's SoundCloud account has around 377 followers and 257 audio files (as of 19 June 2014). The network claims that the move aims at engaging 200 million potential listeners on SoundCloud.

AIR (News) director general, Archana Dutta said, "We ventured into this platform to put our huge audio resources in the form of bulletins on this platform. AIR is already present on various social sites and we have one million likes on Facebook. We are doing well on Twitter as well, with about 2 lakh followers. Initially, we were present only on Android, but now we are present on Blackberry and iPhone as well."

AIR (News) joint director Pushpinder Kaur said, "We have been testing the account for a few months now, and finally launched it last week. We uploaded the Bulletins and then segregated the stories which are tagged to make the searches easy." Within a week of the launch, there have been over 12,000 plays. On an average it is getting 2000-3000 plays in a day. People are also re-posting AIR stories.

Currently, AIR has started promoting their SoundCloud account on social media and will soon be on-air. "The broadcast medium has certain limitations. Transmission depends on the towers and other technical factors. Social media platforms have almost an unlimited reach and AIR should reach to wide spectrums of population, not only in India but around the world. This will include credible and imbalance views. We should be more available on online media and customise our news according to the people's needs."

Dutta said, "I have no hesitation in saying that we are increasingly becoming popular and our news can be more accessible to our growing online listeners."

AIR has a six-member team based in Delhi, and after they consolidate all thedifferent platforms, it would be extended to other regional stations too.

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