A new radio station that covers the Thames Valley has launched on DAB this week.

River Radio was created 12 months ago by directors Sam Sethi and Michael Bourton and covers Berkshire, South Buckinghamshire, South Oxfordshire and North Hampshire.

It has a full-time operations team, a new CFO director Lars Swann and over 30 show presenters. 

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The station has had over 100k unique listeners since it launched.

Sam said: “Mike and I saw a great opportunity to serve a region of 7 million people with hyper-local community shows highlighting businesses and people from the Thames Valley.”

River Radio is the only commercial radio station that has also made all its presenters shareholders in the station.

Michael said: “We believe that the future success of River Radio will be down to the talented presenters we can attract both now and in the future.

"They should benefit from our station's growth, which is why we have made them all co-owners in the radio station."

River Radio currently has over 20 "subject focused" talk shows broadcasting on a wide variety of local topics.

The station deliberately created all of our talk shows to be only one hour long, the same length as a good podcast due to the fact that 41 percent of the UK population listens to podcasts each month.

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Sam added: “Nowadays people want to listen to great content at a time and place that best suits them. Our audience can choose to listen live or listen again on our website. They can also choose to listen to any of our shows as podcasts.”

All shows are recorded, saved and immediately uploaded to Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google and 29 other podcast directories.

These include shows such as Stage Door (arts & theatre) Fitness Into Your Day (health & fitness), wellbeing, Let’s Do Lunch (nutrition), Politically Correct (local politics), What’s on When (local events), Let’s Talk Business (local business), Uncorked (wine & food), School of Parenting (local schools), Inside The Music (local bands), Extra Time (local sports) as well as the more traditional Morning Brew (daily breakfast) and Tea Time (drive home) shows. 

You can listen to River Radio on an Amazon Alexa or Google Smart Speaker by asking Alexa or Google to “enable River Radio”.

The radio station will be appearing at 20 outdoor events this year and are set to announce more details soon.