gavinshearer.com

« That's Incredible! | Main | Mmmm .... Delicious! »

November 9, 2004

Internet Broadcasting Turns 10

WXYC-FM (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is celebrating their first decade of broadcasting their radio signal over the Internet.

My hat is off to them.

Ten years ago, WXYC made history by simulcasting their radio signal to both their "terrestrial" FM audience and the (very) small group of people who were able to receive it online. They did it at a time when literally none of the streaming tools that, today, we all take for granted even existed. No RealAudio. No Windows Media. No MP3. Nothing. It was a hack. It was ugly. It was visionary. And it worked.

How do I know all this? Because we were number two.

On January 9, 1995 - nine years, ten months ago - Western Washington University's own KUGS 89.3 FM went live on the Internet. If you're inclined, you can watch a video about this (7.3 MB, QuickTime required).

(Gotta love that hair. Can you tell I was 21?)

You might also check out Hobbes' Internet Timeline. After loading the page, use your browser's "Find" command to look for KUGS.

A little background on our project. College radio stations have, basically, no money. They're run as a labor of love by a volunteer community, and, in our case, that meant that KUGS' underpowered, 100-watt signal was never going to get any stronger. We used to joke that our signal could reach "three guys smoking weed in the back of a Nova" ... but that was about it. There are parts of Bellingham - and even parts of campus - where you can't get KUGS. This made it hard for us to build real awareness of the station in the community.

So when I became KUGS' Promotions Director in 1994, I started thinking about ways to get the station some awareness and notoriety, do something unique. I was already spending hideous amounts of time working down at Pacific Rim Network, which meant my thoughts were going Internet Service Provider ... Radio Station ... Internet ... Radio.

Eventually, the idea for the project clicked: we'd expand KUGS' audience by broadcasting on the Internet!

And of course, people thought we were crazy ("Who is ever going to sit in front of their computer and listen to music?"). But the idea had PR value, and the station needed visibility. So with the blessing and help of our General Manager (Ted Askew, currently kicking ass doing radio in Aspen) and Program Director (Keith Boyd, now at Microsoft), we got things rolling. We built the station's first-ever home page, found some software to do the job (we used CU-SeeMe, same as WXYC), and hooked it all up using my personal Power Mac, some bubble gum, and a bit of twine. It was a hack from start to finish - the consumer video camera, the cheap fishtank, everything. But we turned it on, and it worked.

One of the things we did in tandem with the Internet project was to launch a promotion, called "Where in the World?" The idea was simple: if you were the first person from a state in the U.S. or a country around the world to listen to KUGS, we'd send you a KUGS t-shirt (we had a lot of extras, and this was a clever way to reclaim some shelving). All you had to do was send us an e-mail with the date and time you were listening (adjusted to PST, of course), and tell us what we were playing. We'd compare entries against the daily music journal, and ta-daa!

The listeners responded; e-mail started coming fast. Washington was first, of course, and then California. Oregon, New York, Florida. And then England. And Australia. And Japan. And we all started freaking out.

(In fact, eventually we ran out of T-shirts!)

Our project took off beyond our wildest speculation - we got attention and media inquiries, plus compliments from other broadcasters around the world. Eventually, this all culminated in an invitation to the National Association of College Broadcasters' conference in March 1995. I was asked to speak on a panel about "emerging and interactive technologies."

So there I was, on a panel of eight folks in a big room in a hotel in Los Angeles, staring out at a packed house full of college kids just like me. And every single one of them wanted to do Internet radio for their own station, because they all were as under-funded and enthusiastic as we were. Clearly, the Internet was going to go from Geek Toy to Mass Market Audience. (Fun Fact: It was at this very same conference - and on this same panel - that I met my friend Heidi.)

The conference was a big turning point for me. I flew home, finished out the last week of Winter quarter at Western, and put my college education on hold to build Pacific Rim. We sold it almost exactly two years later, in March 1997. (And I finally finished my Bachelor's degree in 2002).

But back to WXYC. For a while, we at KUGS thought we might actually be the first in the nation to broadcast online. It was hard to find out who else was out there, however, because search engines didn't really exist. Remember, the Web was much smaller then, and primarily navigated by links from one page to another. The only "directory" page was the NCSA "What's New?" page, which we watched religiously for signs of other online radio stations.

Shortly before launch, we discovered WXYC. And at that point, we knew we weren't going to be first in the country. But we'd settle for second in the USA ... and first on the West coast.

Take a bow, WXYC. Y'all made us proud.

UPDATE, February 6, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at November 9, 2004 4:50 PM. Posted to Geek.

Comments

Post a comment

« That's Incredible! | Main | Mmmm .... Delicious! »