My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the municipalities around the world. When online streaming came to the Internet, I purchased a small business that was putting scanners online and launched it as Broadcastify.

The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and advertising.

About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves. We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly. Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and normalize it all.

We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end, including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution" in our space. Interesting times...