Monitoring radio & TV mentions in real time

Why radio and TV slip past traditional monitoring tools

Google Alerts and most monitoring tools read text: articles, web pages, social media posts. A morning radio show or a TV news bulletin does not exist in written form while it airs, so these tools simply never see it.

Yet a brand's visibility is often decided on air: a quote in the morning news, an executive interviewed on a news channel, a controversy picked up from one programme to the next. And an on-air mention is fleeting. Without continuous listening, it reaches you the next day through someone else, or never, once the window to respond has already closed.

Listening yourself does not scale: a single rolling news channel means twenty-four hours of speech a day. The only realistic approach is to transcribe live streams automatically and search for your keywords in the resulting text as the broadcast unfolds.

How real-time monitoring works

Once monitoring is set up, five steps run without any action on your part:

1. You choose your outlets from the radio stations and TV channels offered in the dashboard, drawn from public directories of live streams.
2. The stream is listened to continuously, 24/7. For a TV channel, only the audio track is used: the picture is never processed.
3. Speech is transcribed automatically, in successive segments, as it airs.
4. Your keywords are searched for in each transcript, using phonetic matching that tolerates small speech-recognition errors.
5. Every detection is verified by a second, more accurate transcription of the audio clip concerned. A mention that is not confirmed is not sent to you.

The alert is then sent by email, according to the alert mode you chose.

Three alert modes, three uses

Real-time. One alert per mention, sent as soon as it is confirmed, with the audio clip attached. This is the mode for crisis management and sensitive topics: an executive's name, a product recall, an industrial site.

Frequency-based. The alert only fires if your keywords are mentioned a given number of times within a time window, for example five times in ten minutes. A single mention triggers nothing; a chain reaction across several stations does. This is the mode that spots a media wave as it forms.

Scheduled (digest). A consolidated summary at a fixed time, every morning at 7:30 for example, with the text of each mention. It replaces the morning broadcast press review and suits frequent keywords that per-mention alerts would make noisy.

Depending on your plan, several rules can run side by side: nothing stops you from following your brand in a daily digest and your CEO's name in real time.

Choosing the right keywords

Good monitoring starts with good keywords. A few principles drawn from practice:

• Aim for proper nouns and distinctive phrases: the brand, a product, an executive. A common word such as “energy” or “bank” would trigger alerts that have nothing to do with you.
• Add the variants people actually say: the acronym and the full name, the brand and the group name, a spokesperson's first and last name.
• Write numbers out in words. On air, you hear “Europe one”, not “Europe 1”: the dashboard rejects digits and suggests the spelled-out form directly.
• Use AND to target a context. By default, the phrases in a rule are joined by OR; with AND, “your brand” and “recall” must both be mentioned to trigger the alert.
• Test, then tighten. A first week of alerts quickly shows which keywords are too broad, and which deserve real-time alerts.

What an alert contains

Each alert gives the outlet, radio station or TV channel, the time of broadcast, the keyword detected and the passage where it was spoken, with its context.

In real-time mode, the email also attaches an MP3 audio clip of about one minute: the triggering passage and the one before it. You hear the mention as it was said, with the tone, the speaker and what led to it, without hunting for a replay that does not always exist. Frequency alerts and digests remain text-only: they include the transcript of each mention.

Who it is for

• Press officers and media relations: know that a segment is on air and play it to the client or management straight away.
• Communications and crisis teams: be warned before the question comes down from the top.
• PR agencies: follow several clients and report broadcast coverage with the clip as evidence.
• Brands: also monitor competitors and the vocabulary of their industry.
• Institutions, local authorities and spokespeople: know what is said about them in morning shows and news bulletins.

What monitoring does not do, or not yet

MediaMonitor focuses on radio and TV, in French. Alerts are delivered by email today; Slack, Webhook and WhatsApp are on the roadmap, as are print, web and social media.

Transcripts are not an archive: they are used to detect your keywords and are deleted automatically after a few days. Finally, the number of alert emails per day depends on the plan: 10 during the trial, 30 on Starter, unlimited on Pro and Scale.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to install software or hardware?

No. Everything is set up in the browser: you create an account, choose your outlets and keywords, and monitoring starts. There is no hardware or software to install.

What happens if a station or channel drops its stream?

Streams are checked regularly. When one becomes unavailable, MediaMonitor automatically looks for another live source of the same outlet and switches to it. The status of each outlet is visible in the dashboard.

An outlet I care about is not listed. What can I do?

Let us know through the request form: the most requested outlets are added first.

How much does radio and TV monitoring cost?

The trial is free for 7 days, with no credit card, covering 1 outlet and 10 keywords. Paid plans start at €20.40 per month for 3 outlets, with no commitment.