I’ve been brainstorming a cool feature that could elevate our Zwift experience and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Imagine having the ability to listen to various radio stations while pedaling through the virtual world of Zwift, much like the radio feature in GTA when you’re cruising in a car.
This addition could bring a whole new level of immersion and entertainment. We could have a range of genres to choose from, catering to everyone’s musical taste. Whether you’re climbing Alpe du Zwift or sprinting on the flats, there would be a perfect tune playing in the background.
What do you all think? I believe it could be a game-changer in making our rides even more enjoyable!
It’s a cycling application, their focus should be on cycling and stuff. You can already listen to any audio you want using a different application, while Zwifting.
Why whould they choose to put their time/effort/your sub money, into audio when they can never even get close to the amount of audio available on other apps.
What they could do is a plugin manager;
So that you could manage your third-party-software-app ingame. Like spotify.
But then again, most machines allready have the option UI overlays / picture-in-picture and most people use their phone for music controll.
Although the idea itself sounds fun when it first comes to mind, a product owner has 8347398429 of these items and has to prioritize these things based on value/time. If you were the PO, how high would you rank this one.
You mean start a Zwift radio station? Broadcasting live from the top of Radio Tower climb? With some wacky drive-time radio DJs and hilarious call-in guests? Live race reporting from the big events, traffic and weather updates (“there’s a big blob holding up traffic on Tempus Fugit again, and it looks like rain can be expected for five minutes again today, just after sundown, clearing up 10 minutes before sunrise”), call-in prize giveaways (be the 20th caller to win free meals at the Neokyo food trucks!), and some rider-voted top music hits?
Wow! You took the idea, shook it up, and improved it! Also, I would like some 24/7 music stations with various music genres like hiphop, drum and bass, rock et cetera
I would much rather Zwift spend their time developing soooo many other things (new roads, better race ranking, better garage management, etc) that are part of their core competency and the point of the platform to begin with, instead of developing something that already exists (iTunes, Spotify, CD players, 8 track tapes, the actual radio!). I’d also rather my subscription fees go towards developing things that are related to cycling, as opposed to buying the rights to existing music.
Okay well…after today’s GCN news, I am now voting for Zwift to feature a picture-in-picture live stream of IRL pro cycling races. Forget the radio idea, give me Zwift TV with race coverage, and I’ll be logged into Zwift for hours and hours most of the year.
Please don’t waste energy on this. You aren’t a music/audio app and listening to audio is pretty easy without this integration. Invest in making the actual core cycling experience better and more capable.
Ok, so I agree I’d prefer they improve the core riding UX first (customizable HUD, better elevation profile braking on corners, road feel, etc.)
But I think there’s an aspect to playlist sharing (which is kinda like radio) that might be interesting in a social Zwift context.
For instance, let’s say they integrate with a popular music streaming service, Zwift knows when you’re listening to that service and all the songs in your current playlist. As you’re listening there’s a little Spotify (or insert your preferred service) icon above your head. Maybe your avatar has headphones etc…
If you enable playlist discovery you can kinda quietly hear the song playing from that person’s playlist as you bike by them (or you just see the name of the current song somehow when you go to rider view). You can select the Spotify (or whatever) icon, see the whole playlist and subscribe to it. Now you’re listening to music from someone else’s playlist, you can favourite that playlist and play it next time. The playlists with the most favourites in the last 24hrs across the platform show up in a top 10 list, you can at any point choose one of those and just listen as you go.
Mainly I’m too lazy to create a playlist so maybe that would get me to listen to more music
But I agree that theres already a lot of solutions out there for listening to music and Zwift should probably first focus on the core riding experience improvements.
Which one though? Spotify? Pandora? Amazon? Apple?
Personally I stream from my phone which I already have running the companion app so I have no need for in-game music that probably isn’t my jam anyway…
There are several platforms that are already near-maxxing their bandwidth capablity just playing the game as it is, i.e. Android tablets and iPads. Adding music quality audio bandwidth to this may cause problems for those who don’t have Gaming PC style setups. Also I agree that to offer music variety on the breadth of Pandora or Spotify would up the monthly dues for playing rights. Just put music on your phone or iPod, or even record player and you’ll have exactly what you want to hear without extra cost and complexity.
