What is Creek?

Creek is a web toolkit for community radio — or anything that looks like community radio, like college radio, NPR stations, and independent commercial FM stations.

It organizes all of the difficult-to-build radio components into one coherent framework — like audio players, show schedules, playlists, audio archives, and streaming. We did the heavy-lifting to build these tools so that stations can save thousands of dollars in web development costs.

However, Creek is very different from "platforms" like Live365, Spinitron, or Mixcloud. There is no "Creek platform" with a big Creek logo hovering over everything.

Instead, Creek is a framework that helps stations build their own platform. We want each station be as unique and independent as possible.

It's also a white-label framework. We want Creek to seamlessly integrate with your station so that your listeners have no idea that you use Creek.

Basically, Creek ⚡️levels up⚡️ your station — while also keeping out of your way.

What is Creek similar to?

Creek is like a combination of:

  • Spinitron: Like Spinitron, Creek can build show schedules, playlists, and reports. However, there is one big difference: Creek allows you to build better websites with more web traffic.
    • Creek does not point your listeners away from your website and over to a separate "platform" like Spinitron.
    • Creek allows Google to send more new listeners to your website because they can only find your radio content — like shows and playlists — on your own website rather than at Spinitron.
  • StreamGuys: Think of Creek as an alternative to other streaming companies like StreamGuys and SecurenetSystems.
  • WordPress: Creek is a CMS for radio that lets you build modern radio websites without all of the messy themes and plugins.
  • Mixcloud: Creek lets you publish DJ mixes and integrate them with your website. It also lets you build your own "Mixcloud-style" platform for your station — complete with a website and apps.
  • Public Media Apps: We build radio apps for iOS and Android that are built on our nicely-structured app developer framework — making them more coherent and intuitive than apps by companies like Public Media Apps. We want our apps to give small stations a fighting chance against Spotify and the other big-name platforms.
  • Barix and Telos: With the Creek Adapter, stations now have a low-cost streaming device that is:
    • More useful: It's both a stream encoder and audio archiver!
    • Easier to maintain: We set it up for you remotely!
    • More flexible: It's a full Linux device, so we can program it to do other things — like send updates to your RDS system, or check on the health of network devices.

What else should I know about Creek?

Creek is an independent and self-funded project.

We will never be bought out.

We have no investors telling us to "MAXIMIZE PROFITS!!" rather than do things the right way.

We're based in California, but we're not part of the crazy start-up culture.

We'll be around for the long-haul.

Creek was founded in 2012, so we've been working with stations for over a decade.

We're dedicated to keeping Creek running for decades into the future.

Our actual long-term goal (our secret mission!) is actually to archive stories from local communities, and preserve them for decades. That's what the archiving part is about. We want to be archive.org, but for stories.

We want to help with everything — like basic IT stuff!

We often work as an "IT department" for your station. We want make sure that all of your cloud services are running, and help you with basic Internet and networking problems.