Web Radio

Radio Production for Internet Streaming

Chris Priestman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781136029219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Anyone wanting to set up a low cost web radio station will benefit from the advice and information provided by this book. Not only will you gain technical and practical know-how to enable your station to go live, but also an appreciation of the legal and copyright implications of making radio, potentially for international audiences and in the rapidly evolving environment of the web.To succeed, your radio content will need to be carefully planned and your station properly promoted. Advice is given on taking advantage of the scalability web radio introduces for building audiences in line with your resources, for scheduled live output and for making programmes available on demand, including music, news, speech radio and audience participation. Case studies from around the world are provided to demonstrate how different radio organisations are applying the new flexibility web radio has to offer in a wide range of situations.
Together with its associated website www.web-radio-book.com, the book also acts as a starting point for locating a range of sources for further advice and lines of research. Learn how to:
- go live with your own low cost web radio station (either managing the server yourself or using a host service)
- assess the right server set-up to handle the number of simultaneous listeners expected
- get the best sound quality to your listeners
- take account of the range of devices available for receiving web radio
- plan your station, programming and associated website
- identify and reach your audience
- build audience feedback and data into your station's strategy
- tackle the additional legal and ethical dimensions of radio on the web
- source more detailed information

1 What is radio on the Web?

‘Let us not forget that the value of this great system does not lie primarily in its extent or even in its efficiency. … Its worth depends on the use that is made of it. … For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellow men, to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events.’

These words make a doubly appropriate introduction to a book about combining the first new medium of the twentieth century, radio, with the last, the Internet. They were spoken by Herbert Hoover, the then United States Secretary of Commerce, in 1924 about the uncertain beginnings of the technology by which humans learned to communicate with each other using radio waves (at the start of the third Washington Radio Conference). But they could equally be taken from one of the more restrained paeans of anticipation that greeted the emergence of the Internet into public consciousness almost exactly 70 years later.

In those early years on the frontier of wireless listening, the equipment was bulky and awkward to use, the sound quality was poor by today’s standards and reception would often break up because, in America at least, too many people were trying to broadcast on the system at the same time: but nevertheless those who had receivers were captivated by the magic of the experience – and of course the novelty. If we take out the word ‘wireless’ from that sentence and substitute ‘web radio’ we have something very close to a description of the newest way of tuning in at the turn of the twenty-first century.

There are indeed many striking parallels to be drawn between the early assimilation of the two technologies into public life. Some are no more than incidental curiosities, but most arise from important characteristics they both share. So identifying these similarities – and also important differences – between the ‘use that is made’ of radio transmitted on analogue waves and via the Internet forms the substance of this opening chapter. From the many parallels between the two – and those differences – we can get a useful sense of the trajectory of development we can expect for web radio.

Box 1.1 Parallel 1: Problems for listeners – by today’s standards

In their early years, both technologies suffer from primitive sound quality, interrupted signals when their transmission systems become overloaded and from the immobility of receivers, in the form of the valve wireless and the desktop computer.

One crucial thing to recognize at the outset is that, whether we like it or not, the presence of the Internet forces us to reconsider what radio means to us as a medium. We have by now, most of us, taken it for granted all our lives: turn on the radio and there you have it. Radio needed no more definition than the transmission system by which we picked it up. All sound programming carried from a transmitter to our tuner using the properties of electromagnetic waves we called radio. What’s more, the precise nature of the radio medium is determined by the available technology we use to hear it and that has changed over time. On a technological level the Internet is just another transmission system, but the fact that it is also a unified medium that can carry all the pre-existing mass media – in text, images and sound – separately or in combination means that for the first time we have to define what makes radio solely in terms of (a) the content and (b) how the listener distinguishes it from other sounds available through their multi-purpose receiver – the computer.

So, as this book is about putting radio content on the Internet, I intend to spend the first two chapters identifying the ways in which digitalization and the Internet are expanding the boundaries of radio and its relationship with the competing public media. In this first chapter, having offered some introductory definitions of the Internet and webcasting from the radio practitioner’s perspective, I review the defining characteristics of traditional radio technology, emphasizing those characteristics it shares in common with the Internet. In the second chapter, I place web radio in the wider – much wider – context of all the other sounds to be found on the Internet. There are plenty of sounds out there and most of them are not radio.

The ‘Further reading’ at the end of this chapter gives a selection of more specialist texts that go into the kind of detail about the development of the two transmission systems that is beyond the scope of this book.

What’s new about the New Medium?

The innumerable books and articles that have already been published about the Internet are testimony both to its importance as a new medium and to the power of suggestion over the human mind. Distinguishing between the real benefits and the hype is perhaps the most demanding challenge this combination of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) presents us with. We are undoubtedly living through a major media revolution and that inevitably involves the violent collision of conflicting hopes and fears over how it will change our lives. But can we guess where this revolution is taking us? Some reference to the history of previous media technologies should provide some helpful, though not necessarily conclusive, perspectives; helpful because it offers a framework in which to decide what we can do with radio on the Web.

In the history of mass communication, no new medium has yet made an earlier one obsolete, despite the reiterated predictions at the time of each new arrival.

Photography was supposed to mean the end of painting.

Film was supposed to mean the end of the novel.

Radio was supposed to mean the end of newspapers.

Television was supposed to mean the end of film and radio.

What did happen, of course, was that the new medium changed its predecessor but did not replace it. Or, to put it another way, the older medium always adapted itself to fit into the new mix of competitors – redefining itself according to its intrinsic strengths. In the case of radio versus television, for example, one critical advantage that emerged for radio was that you can take it with you while you are doing something else. Before television, the old wireless had become the fixed centrepiece of domestic life across the industrialized nations and it commanded high levels of attention when it was on. At the same time as the TV was taking over that space, the technological switch from bulky, fragile valve to tiny, robust transistor freed the radio to accompany the individual, especially out into the car. We will need to bear these precedents in mind as we begin to assess the accuracy of early predictions about today’s new technology:

Now the Internet is supposed to mean the end of newspapers, television and radio.

Box 1.2 Parallel 2: The threat to competing media – or not

Early fears of the existing news and entertainment industries that analogue radio would ‘steal’ their audiences proved unfounded: in fact, the three industries soon become mutually interdependent. There are similar worries about the fallout from the convergence of text, sound and moving pictures onto digital platforms like the Internet, but the early signs are of an evolution of similar complementary relationships, for example, between web radio and analogue radio, as we shall see through this book.

Two key questions about newness

Returning to the quote at the start of the chapter, what the Internet proves to be ‘worth’ as a mass medium ‘depends on the use that is made of it’. To be useful it must offer a new capability over and above the existing technology. In order to assess its usefulness to radio listeners there are two related questions I intend to take as recurrent themes throughout the subsequent chapters of the book. They are questions anyone intending to use the Internet to transmit radio must ask themselves:

1 What new strengths does web radio add to pre-Internet radio?

2 What established strengths of radio does web radio supplant?

But first, what is the Internet and what use is it to a well-established medium like radio?

The Internet on the phone system

The word ‘Internet’ – short for ‘inter-network’ – was first coined in the 1960s to describe a small network of research computers linked together via the US telephone system. It began as an experimental method of sending text messages (emails) between computers in such a way that they could not be blocked: if one telephone exchange or run of cable was out of action then the message would find an alternative route through the system to reach its destination address. The important characteristic of the phone infrastructure which this text-based inter-network exploited was that it had no centre, no single point of control. A single message could be sent to everyone connected to the network who knew how to use a computer to pick it up. Conversely, everyone on the network could post individual messages at a single computer location...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is radio on the Web?
• 2 ...And what web radio isn't
• 3 Stream receivers and how the listener listens
• 4 Streaming radio output
• 5 Established radio broadcasters on the Web
• 6 Internet-only stations and other adventures in web radio
• 7 One voice in a very large crowd: getting heard
• 8 Copyright on web radio
• 9 Free speech on web radio
• 10 Redefining radio content
• 11 Scheduling for redefined audiences
• 12 So how is web radio different? A checklist
• Appendix 1 Glossary
• Appendix 2 Useful websites
• Appendix 3 Bibliography
• Index