Small Historic and Cultural Sites Now Able to Build Custom Audio Tours with Antenna Direct® from Antenna

Technical story-telling company offers affordable DIY option for producing high-quality audio tour experiences

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Antenna, the world’s leading designer of digital content and mobile experiences for historic and cultural institutions, today announced the release of Antenna Direct®, a DIY audio tour package for small museums and galleries. Antenna Direct provides a combination of hardware and cloud-based software priced exclusively for small museums and galleries for the development of highly-engaging, custom audio tours.

“There are a number of museums and galleries around the United States that simply don’t have the budget for a full-scale, highly-customized audio tour for their exhibits,” said Sean Lentner, Chief Technology Officer at Antenna. “By offering these institutions an affordable solution in Antenna Direct, they now have the ability to develop their own tours – and can provide the same rich experiences that larger institutions currently offer their visitors at a broader scale.”

Audio tours help museums and galleries tell the stories behind their art and artifacts in gripping detail. These tours also enable institutions to cater to globally diverse audiences by providing content in multiple languages. Early testing of Antenna Direct at museums and galleries that piloted the technology was very positive, successfully enabling these smaller institutions to take the first step in enlivening interpretation for their audiences.

Among the first to utilize Antenna Direct is The Museum of American Finance in New York City. The Museum today launched a 12-stop audio tour of its permanent exhibition using Antenna Direct.

“There is so much more to these objects than we can include on printed labels, so the audio guides will bring the exhibits to life in new and exciting ways,” said David Cowen, President of The Museum of American Finance. “Antenna Direct was extremely simple to use and I believe the guides enhance our overall visitor experience.”

Antenna Direct – which is currently only offered in the United States – features Antenna’s newest audio player X-Plorer™ 2, a 20-unit DataCharger, and a cloud-based tour building system called TourBuilder that provides a simple drag-and-drop environment, allowing museums to choreograph their own tour experience. Using TourBuilder, museum staff can record their own audio “stops” and upload them as multimedia files that can be used to build the structure of a tour. Once the tour is built, it is transferred from the cloud to the Mobile Device Management system, to the DataCharger, and then to the X-Plorer™ 2 devices.

Antenna Direct enables museums and galleries to build three types of tours – random access tours, linear tours, and random access tours with linear sequences.

• Random access tours allow visitors to choose their own route through the institution, and select stops depending on what they’re observing.
• Linear tours guide visitors through a museum along a set route established by museum staff that predetermines what visitors look at and when, creating a more linear narrative experience.
• Random access tours with linear sequences are a blend of tour types. It gives visitors the freedom to choose where they go and what they look at, and takes them through set combinations of stops and narration. For example, the museum may want visitors to look at objects in a specific room in order, but not be concerned with the order in which they enter the rooms.

In addition to the basic TourBuilder functionality, museum operators are also offered a number of add-on features from Antenna – including script writing, translation, and voice over.

“With this technology, we’re able to make changes frequently,” said Michael Sossler, Executive Director of Museum Village, a 19th century living history museum located in Monroe, New York. “Building our tour with Antenna Direct was a very simple operation. The process of preparing the scripts, building the tour, and getting it live took just a few days to accomplish. The audio tour is another way for us to bring history to life and make the museum experience an incredible one.”

“We’re getting back to basics with the release of Antenna Direct,” said David Falter, President and CEO of Antenna. “We’ve packaged the technological components that are essential to the art of storytelling and empowered our museum partners to develop their own visitor experience. It’s a simple approach, but one that is much needed for institutions with limited resources.”

About Antenna ™Founded in 1984, Antenna ™ is the leading provider of technology, content, and related services to the world’s artistic, historic, and cultural institutions. In partnership with these clients, Antenna delivers an immersive, indelible experience in multiple languages to more than 63 million people across the globe each year. With a proud heritage of award-winning innovation, Antenna enables people to see more clearly, understand more deeply, and appreciate culture more widely using a variety of technologies. For more information, visit www.antennainternational.com or connect with the company on Facebook and Twitter @AntennaIntl.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160712005047/en/

Tailwind Public Relations
Jeff Pecor, 802-497-1932
[email protected]

Source: Antenna

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