A Moment of Silence Please

WOXY is dead.
Long live WOXY.

WOXY has died and been resurrected at least three times now.In the early days they were based in Oxford Ohio in a little studio in the middle of a road by a corn field that ended in dirt at one end and at Miami University at the other. I'm not making that up. I've been there.

Gentle historians would say that 97X transitioned to the internet on May 31st 2005. That was abotu a year after First Broadcasting bought the station from Balogh Broadcasting. The format flip came for the same reason it always does. It wasn't making money. But some longtime pro0grammers couldn't let go. WOXY had been a monument to Rock since 1983. They took it online. 97.7 held onto the WOXY call letters complicating branding forever.

In August 2007, WOXY.Com cut a deal was finalized with Cincinnati public radio station 91.7 WVXU wherein WVXU broadcast WOXY.com programming on their HD-2 radio channel. To their credit, WVXU seems to still be holding on to that programming and branding for their HD-2 even now. Lala.com, owned the station from 2006-2009 but didn't do a damn thing with it. On the bright side the bills got paid . In July 2009, WOXY.Com relocated it's studios to Austin, TX. Their broadcasting schedule remained the same. Then yesterday that announcement came out. Live broadcasts are over, and to my definition that's not radio anymore.

The First Webcast

There are thousands and none seem to succeed fiscally. Not even the trendy and popular ones manage to get by on ad revenues Ex.WOXY. It's the first one certainly deserves the most attention. Of course, the entire way that information and, yes, audio is being broadcast has been changed over the past few years. Not only have satellites and the Internet made a difference, but even more innovations in getting information from one place to another are developing, often as a combination of more than one technology.

The first Internet broadcasts appear to be way back in 1993. The IMS (Internet Multicasting Service) was set up in Washington, D.C., as a non-profit experiment. There is an archive of some of their early programs here: http://museum.media.org/radio/

The IMS ran a cable up to the roof of the National Press Building, then directed a high-speed wireless link to the White House lawn to allow the President to see his first live Internet broadcast. In January of 1994, despite the objections of the SEC and the U.S. Patent Office, the IMS posted the full text of all Patent and SEC documents for free. They also hosted the first online databases from the General Services Administration (GSA) , the (FEC) Federal Election Commission, the Federal Reserve , and the Government Printing Office. They topped it off by , providing audio feeds from the floor of House and Senate. They had in excess of 50,000 users per day.

They provided all services free for 18 months then threatened to shut it down. They gave 60 days notice that they were killing the service. The SEC took over their own hosting. The pansies at the Patent office threw a fit and refused to have their data online.