Social Live Audio Platform Mixlr Gets iOS App For Broadcasting And Listening On The Go

Mixlr, which these days describes itself as a platform for social live audio, has finally debuted on the iPhone with a dedicated app to let users broadcast live audio on-the-go, and browse and listen to streams hosted on the service.

It follows a relaunch of the Silicon Roundabout, London-based startup’s web offering which saw the service turn up the dial on its social features significantly — think: Twitter’s follower/following model with a sprinkling of Turntable.fm’s listening rooms — to enable broadcasters to interact with listeners in real-time, moving Mixlr beyond its roots as a ‘UStream for audio‘. It also added further integration with SoundCloud, which is in someways also a competitor, with the ability to create live sets via SoundCloud playlists.

Mixlr’s iOS app is a pretty fully-featured effort, supporting many of the same features as its desktop cousin. These include the ability to broadcast “high quality audio” over 3G, 4G or WiFi, see who’s listening and chat in real-time, and save live broadcasts as an archive. On the pure content consumption end, users can browse and search live broadcasts, listen with their friends (Mixlr ties into Facebook’s social graph), and get a personalised view of Mixlr via the ‘My Mixlr’ tab — a dashboard of sorts showing what your friends are listening to.

It’s hoped that the iPhone app will spur on further growth for Mixlr, as mobile has unsurprisingly been a much-requested feature. To date, the startup claims over 14,000 monthly broadcasters attracting over 500,000 unique listeners each month.

In a statement, Greg Lloyd, Co-founder and CEO of Mixlr, says “It’s no secret that more and more people consume and create content on mobile devices. We’ve seen considerable growth so far without venturing into mobile, so this release is a big step for Mixlr”.

Mixlr launched in summer 2010 and is co-founded by Lloyd and CTO Rob Watson. The company has since grown to a team of 5, and in September 2011 raised an undisclosed seed round from Passion Capital. It makes money via a freemium model with paying subscribers getting additional features.