The Early Days of Web Radio

Jose at Arcane Radio Trivia briefly traces the beginning of internet radio, which is now nearly 14 years old (older than DVDs, in fact).

However, I do have one addendum/correction. Jose says that KPIG was the first commercial station to broadcast on the web, starting in 1995. But there was a station here in ‘geek-land, Champaign-Urbana, IL, that also started webcasting in 1995, with October as the start date. The station was WEBX (still on the air but under entirely different ownership) 93.5 FM, officially licensed to Tuscola, IL, and it called itself “The Web.” It broadcast an eclectic AAA-style format, with a lot of rootsy rock and loose playlist. Briefly its studios were located right next door to community radio WEFT, where the mediageek radioshow originates.

Back in ’95 the Web claimed it was the first commercial station broadcasting on the internet. Although on KPIG’s website, the about page says that station began web broadcasting on Aug. 2, 1995 — which beats WEBX by two months.

Unfortunately the Web was sold and turned into a generic rock station in the late 90s. A great experiment, but perhaps ahead of its time.

SM East: Microsoft’s Bid To Beat Flash at the Plug-In Game

This morning’s keynote was Microsoft’s Sean Alexander giving a peek under the hood of its new Silverlight platform which offers a bi-platform (MacOS & Windows) browser plug-in rich media player that looks an awful lot like Flash. He also showed off MS’s new production suite offering design and authoring tools that look a lot like Adobe’s.

It’s an interesting challenge to Adobe’s Flash Video, especially since the media server is built-in to MS’s new server OS, and the plug-in is backwards compatible with older Windows Media versions. It also represents another sign that online video is busting out of the player and into the browser.

The problem for those of us in education and the grassroots is really choosing the platform you want to use so that your sites and content don’t look like 1999 web. Certainly, if your content is compelling and challenging compared to the mainstream that should bring people in. But in my everyday existence doing educational video I’m finding more students and faculty balking at having to use a player rather than watching right in the browser.

I don’t relish having to learn two entirely different development platforms, nor supporting both. For me, Flash is still ahead because it supports Linux, where Silverlight does not. Yet, as standards, neither are nearly as open as MPEG-4, or a codec unencumbered by patents and copyrights like Ogg Theora. Can the open source community meet this challenge?

Another question is: Where is Real Networks in all of this? Will their server start delivering Flash? Silverlight content? If Real won’t do these formats, or can’t offer something that competes in the browser, then their future isn’t looking so bright.

Technorati tag: Streaming Media East 2007

Spring in New York: Streaming Media East

I’m in NYC for the Streaming Media East conference. I’ve gone to the last two West coast conferences, so this is the first East I’m attending. One of my goals in attending is to speak with other educators in the streaming/online media field, but also make the educational sector more understandable to other sectors of the industry. To that end I’m moderating a session called “Making the Case for Streaming Media” tomorrow afternoon and hope to be able to speak to as many educators in attendance as possible.

I like the Streaming Media conferences because they are not huge and attract a very diverse set of participants from vendors, entertainment, enterprise and education, along with entrepreneurs. The speakers are encouraged to be direct and honest, so I don’t feel like I’m getting a sales pitch.

This conference usually gets my mind going, so I’ll probably blog some thoughts as things get underway tomorrow.

Technorati tag: Streaming Media East 2007

Bringing People Together with Streaming Media

This evening I helped put on a live video webcast [archive webcast link] for an event where I really felt like the webcast served a practical and necessary purpose, allowing many more people to view the event than could fit in the venue.

The event was an open forum to tackle “Racism, Power and Privilege” at the University of Illinois, where I work (and once studied). It was held in the university’s largest auditorium, which holds 1750 people, and was filled to capacity. So two overflow rooms were arranged to watch the webcast, where I’m told there were about 640 people in attendance.

It’s a very important event for this time at Illinois, where the racial climate has been becoming more tense and hostile. The pressure to retire the university’s racist mascot continues to rise while it seems like a lot of the majority white students refuse to acknowledge their privileged position. Two recent scandals have shone light on the problem of Illinois’ racial climate. One involves hateful violent messages posted about Native Americans to a Facebook group called “If They Get Rid of the Chief I’m Becoming a Racist.” Another regards a “Tacos and Tequila” party thrown by a frat and sorority last fall where attendees came dressed up as the most noxious racial stereotypes.

The student group that organized the forum had to put a lot of pressure on some administrators just to attend the forum and listen to concerns of students. These same students have been coming under fire themselves for daring to stand up against the embedded racist attitudes prevalent amongst a privileged white student population. Some of the organizers talked about receiving death threats and constant harassing emails.

From the packed house in the auditorium to the long lines of people who queued up to speak, it was clear how necessary the forum was and how pent up the demand was. Aside from using the university’s sports arena, there really wasn’t a venue to hold everyone who wanted to be a part of this event.

While watching a live webcast isn’t the same as being at the event, I think the overflow rooms serve a similar purpose because they allow hundreds more people to watch together. And those who couldn’t make it into any of the venues could still watch from their desktops.

While I’m a big proponent of using the internet to distribute video, I often feel like live webcasts of some events are really more window-dressing than something truly useful. You get bragging rights for having a live webcast, even if very few people tune in.

Today, the live webcast was not just trophy but served a real purpose that would have been difficult to pull off (especially so cheaply) without streaming media technology. I feel lucky to have been asked to help make it happen.

Bipartisan Hostility Towards Your Rights To Record and Enjoy Satellite & Net Radio

Sure, it looked like a new day in Congress with the Democrats taking over. This past weekend’s National Conference on Media Reform definitely reinforced that notion as it pertains to media ownership and internet freedom. But the entertainment industry and copyright cartel are a whole different she-bang.

Too many entertainment industry liberals are way to close to the Democratic party to let pass your right and ability to time shift music programming from satellite radio and the internet. There’s language taking aim at portable satellite radios that let you record and playback programs in a bill called the Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act, reintroduced by copyright crusaders from both sides of the aisle, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

According to CNet,

Radio listeners would be permitted to set their devices to automatically record full radio programs on certain channels at certain times. But allowing users to program their devices to automatically find and record specific sound recordings, artists or albums–say, only all Michael Jackson tracks played on the service–would be prohibited. So-called “manual” recording would be allowed, as long as it’s done “in a manner that is not an infringement of copyright.”

Nevermind that without this law, allowing listeners to find specific recordings would not be “an infringement of copyright,” in the first place.

What’s next? I’ll be allowed to TiVo a whole evening of prime-time TV, but not be able to find a specific program?

Radioshow Experiment a Partial Success

Last night I attempted to broadcast the radioshow live from Memphis using Skype to connect us with the WEFT studio. Here in Memphis at the Cook Convention Center we got a wired (rather than wireless) connection to the internet, which I understood was shared by very few people. I don’t know how many people were really on that connection, but we did experience some level of drop-out and lost the connection several times.

I kept an open phone connection along with a chat session open with the WEFT studio so we were able to reconnect pretty quickly while Jay in the studio scrambled to stave off dead air.

Because of the several interruptions over the course of the half-hour I’ll have to do a little editing and re-recording for the podcast/syndicated version of the program.

But I’m glad we gave this a shot. I chose Skype because it’s a simple audio internet audio technology that provides decent quality audio. I’ve also found it to be relatively robust even when connectivity is slow.

Another method to do a live remote would be to do an mp3 stream. The advantage to this method is that you can set your bitrate, and therefore the quality of the audio. However, MP3 streaming servers, like Shoutcast or Icecast, don’t adjust dynamically to network conditions, so I thought that we would have been more likely to lose the connection than with Skype.

The lesson learned with this little experiment is that bandwidth is still king. No matter how cool and robust your technology or software, if your bandwidth dips out too low it’s nearly impossible to retain a real-time streaming audio or video feed.

So, if I do this again I’ll definitely spend more time testing the bandwidth at the venue at multiple times during the day, and from multiple locations.

Nevertheless, I have to give my thanks to Free Press and Kate McKenney for being very helpful in doing the broadcast in the first place.

Public Radio Podcasts Doing Well, Making Underwriter $$$

I, for one, am glad that there are podcasts of public radio programs. My local station, WILL-AM, has been podcasting for about eighteen months, and I appreciate being able to catch up on Bob McChesney’s show and some of their other great public affairs programs on my own schedule. I agree with Jack Brighton, who runs internet operations for WILL, who said on my radio program back in January that podcasting is just another way of making their programming accessible, and therefore part of the mission of public broadcasting.

So, I’m glad to see that NPR is teaming up with other producers to offer a whole pile of podcasted programs, and finding success in terms of downloads, and underwriting. Of course, underwriting is a often a little too close to advertising for my taste much of the time. And yet, because of its limits (on broadcast at least) it’s still not as pericious as real commercial advertising.

Still, NPR tells Current that its thinking about selling underwriting on “themed packages of podcasts,” which seems to strike a little closer to advertising. In fact, NPR can sell full blown ads on podcasts as long as it’s only online, since the noncommercial rules only apply to the broadcast band.

But bandwidth does cost money, even before the AT&T starts charging content providers. And I’m not sure how well pledge drives would work for podcasts. I don’t know what the solution is (aside from better public or federal funding, which has its own set of problems), so I’ll just have to wait and see if NPR can resist the urge to cash in too much.

Podcasting & Vodcasting: Educational Solutions Looking for a Problem

I’m at a technology and learning conference at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN today and tomorrow. It’s part of my day-job life as an educational media producer, but it’s also a good opportunity to get a glimpse at what educators are trying to do with technology, and there’s many lessons to be learned for any media maker.

There are several sessions scheduled about podcasting and so-called vodcasting, better known as video blogging. The thing I keep encountering in the higher education world is that podcasting popularized distributing audio by the web, but for all the interest and excitement, it really seems like nobody’s really talking about the big question: why podcast?

I just sat through a vendor demo from Apple on creating a podcast or “enhanced” podcast using their iLife ’06 tools. It was fine, I guess, but short on truly instructive details. As an aside, I’ve been to a bunch of Apple demos on media-related stuff, and the engineers they send to do them typically don’t have much audio or video production skill. All they have is basic iLife skills, which really doesn’t help to sell me on their stuff, even if it works. (It took the presenter more then fifteen minutes to get her PowerBook to use the mic while we sat there and watched — even though their display table was just 20 feet away where you’d think they could have gotten that prepared in advance).

The big question I keep asking of everyone who’s hot on podcasting and video blogging for education is: what is podcasting doing that we could’t do 18 months ago with streaming audio or posting audio files (mp3 or ogg) on a webpage? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer.

Apple, in particular, is making these technologies cool and trendy for educators. So if you want to be a star in the higher ed technology world you’d better be podcasting or video blogging. But it makes about as much sense as any other trend.

And, yet, I do have a podcast, because I find RSS to be a great way to distribute my radio show. And I could see how having students subscribe to a podcast feed to get supplemental audio would be great, but only if you can guarantee that students have a PC and/or MP3 player. But at a big public university this isn’t guaranteed or required (and in many cases can’t be required, due to all sorts of state rules and laws). Without a personal PC or MP3 player, podcast feeds aren’t any more useful than posting MP3s to a static page.

Am I biting the hand that feeds me? No, I would love to encourage more faculty to create audio and video to enhance their courses. For example, I would love to see more scientists make cool demos so that students could watch experiments multiple times, or in slow motion, outside of lab or class. And if podcasting or vodcasting trendiness gets them in my door, great.

But the thing that the podcasting trend is selling educators is: just plug in a crappy $10 microphone and prattle on for a half-hour and drop some pictures into Garage Band and your students will watch it on their video Ipods. Yeah right, because they pay so much attention in class when the professor is prattling on in monotone to PowerPoint slides, they’re definitely going to want a podcast of that.

We need some recommendations and best practices here, but Apple, in particular, ain’t selling that.

To be fair, I talked to a biologist here at Purdue a little earlier today who is producing short-form enhanced podcasts that she posts to her website as supplemental material for students who want or need it. She’s giving a presentation later today about using script-writing techniques for making your podcasts and videos more interesting and useful. That’s more of what I’m getting at, and I hope that people actually attend.

Stream Anything with VLC

Engadget has a how-to for streaming anything with the free VLC player, which is obviously more than a player, since it also includes a streaming server.

What’s nice about VLC is that you don’t have to be tied to a patent-protected format like MP3 or some varietal of MPEG video. Streaming makes a great way to separate a studio from an unlicensed transmitter, too.

Streaming Media West Sessions On-Line

If your interest was piqued at all by my (long) posts from Streaming Media West, you can check out some of the sessions for yourself. Most of them are now available in streaming video, although not my session (it was only audio recorded).

If you actually do video webcasts, I recommend watching the session on Planning and Executing Effective Webcasts.