-the trick is to
-'narrowcast' from home-studios all over the world, forget about
-forces for so called standards of professional state and private radio
-formats, but still be able to provide your sound to a couple of
-hundred listeners at once. this is a question of shared bandwidth
-and starting with small & open coalitions like the x-change network.
-another example are DJ radio stations with a highly specialized sound,
-broadcasting club events and live mixing, having the freedom to
-not care if it is 50 or 5000 listeners. another case are net.radio
-artists which are exploring the sound of network topologies, loops,
-stars, rings, clusters, pyramids. plus there is a whole field of
-net.sound experiments  which in one or the other way interlock with
-such practises.

well, it all boils down to the question of access once again.
about a year ago we (firstfloor electronix) started our experiments with
"narrowcasting", utilizing relatively wide bandwidths - wide enough to
stream realaudio at 80kbps - to broadcast our "desktop readio" shows.
obviously we werent so much interested in delivering our content to the
home internet user as we were trying to circumnavigate the problems with
getting hold of highend live broadcast equipement for terrestrial
distrubution. we streeamed our show live from the Ars Electronica Center
to our neighbours, the Stadtwerkstatt and the Cableradio station FRO
(which are in the same building) and FRO then took our near-cd quality
stream and put it on the cable.

the same concept was used for "william burroughs memorial jam" which was
broadcast in part on the austrian national radio as part of kunstradios
"recycling the future" event during the last Ars Electronica Festival.

now i am in vancouver without all the commodities the Ars Electrnica
Center has to offer, and again the question arises - how can one broadcast
efficiently from low budgewt events and locations. the issues seem to stay
the same, once again its all about distribution. i still believe its
important to use the existing media, more than trying to find "new" ways
of providing content in a setting such as the internet, just for the one
reason that it is not very efficient to clogg up the net with
high-bandwidth audio. the logistics of the net are not made for it, and
who can really afford the necessary bandwidth to be able to serve 1000
high-qual realaudio streams, even after shelling out 5000USD for the
server software and about the same amount for a server.
personally i dont believe that anything in that priceclass is for free,
meaning distribution - to place your content on a setup like that will
eventually cost the same as buying time on a "classic" broadcast medium.

so, following my argument, the most important thing would be to try to
have a network of rather small servers which are well connected to
university radio stations, pirate radio and public broadcasting networks -
evenif it sounds anachronistic. also i have the feeling that the "live"
element is a bit overstressed in the i-net radio community - strictly
speaking, nothing which is broadcast via realaudio is live, thereis at
least a 15 sec delay;-) - it might be a more approriate to develope
"automated" systems that make use of the permanent and
immediate availablity that distribution via the i-net provides...

thanks for bearing with me during my polemic elaborations
matt

p.s. there is a new, not quite finished update about Hank Bull, a pioneer
in the radio and telecommuniction culture, on
http://vehicle.aec.at/fresh/freshE.html 



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