Internet talk radio


Internet talk radio is an audio broadcasting service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting radio shows on the internet is usually preferred to webcasting since it is not transmitted broadly through wireless means. It mainly works by Internet radio transmissions.

History

In 1993, Carl Malamud launched Internet talk radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert." This was Internet radio only insofar as it was conceptually a radio show on the Internet. As late as 1995, Internet talk radio was not available via multicast streaming; it was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one." However Malamud was among the foremost proponents of multicasting technology. In late 1994, his Internet Multicasting Service was set to launch RTFM, a multicast Internet radio news station. In January 1995, RTFM's news programming was expanded to include "live audio feeds from the House and Senate floors."
A 1995 UK experiment in Internet talk radio was set up by the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute in collaboration with the BBC's Open University Production Unit. Called "KMi Maven Of The Month", the events featured interviews with experts in Human Computer Interaction, New Media and Artificial Intelligence, and deployed a combination of streaming audio, web-chat, phone-ins and live video. The first event, an interview with Henry Lieberman of the MIT Media Lab, took place on 18 October 1995. That event used a mixture of least-common-denominator technology available at that time: 14.4kbit/s dialup modems, Netscape, RealAudio, CU-SeeMe, email, web forms and chat windows for questioners, and landline telephony to 'pull in' questioners after they had provided their phone numbers.