I ♥ College Radio

I was actually a bit surprised that the HTML heart symbol was permitted in the title field there. The iHeartRadio brand launched with the URL iheartmusic.com back in April of 2008. It was sort of a mix of ideas from the start. they were going to stream music to mobile devices and webcast 800 of Clear Channel radio stations online. The comedy here is that Clearchannel is simultaneously moving toward a national programming model where hundreds of these stations will be more-or-less identical.So as tech-savvy as it might seem at first, the content is about as edgy as cheese-whiz.

Last year they debuted the ability to make custom music streams, much like Pandora. Clearly they had figured something out about the content problem. Then I got news yesterday. Clear Channel was soliciting college radio stations to join their platform. This was unexpected.  They put out a press release confirming everything on January 23. You can read it here. Sources report that they are negotiating individual deals with university and radio station representatives, indicating a level of motivation and interest that cannot possibly be generated by a sense of charity.  The first college stations to get involved are below:

• Appalachian State’s WASU – Boone, NC
• Connecticut College’s WCNI – New London, CT
• Dartmouth College's WFRD - Hanover, NH
• Denison University’s WDUB – Granville, OH
• DePaul University’s Radio DePaul – Chicago, IL
• Emerson College’s WERS – Boston, MA
• Flagler College’s WFCF – St. Augustine, FL
• Green River College’s KGRG – Tacoma, WA
• Ithaca College’s WICB – Ithaca, NY
• Rice University’s Rice Radio – Houston, TX
• Seton Hall University’s WSOU – Orange, NJ
• Stanford University’s KZSU- Stanford, CA
• Temple University’s WHIP – Philadelphia, PA
• College of Wooster’s WCWS – Wooster ,OH

You will notice that not all of these are even radio stations in the broadcasting sense. Rice radio is the webcast that the students were left with after KTRU was sold off. WHIP, and Radio DePaul are all also strictly online. The rest are a mixed bag: WSOU is arguably the biggest college radio station in America, WERS is nearly as big.  WICB is a large but rural college station with s strong commercial lean, KGRG, WASU, WCNI and WCWS are all rimshots to major markets lost in the suburbs. WFRD is in the unrated market areas on the Vermont and New Hampshire border. There is no pattern to this list, it screams shotgun approach, and these are just the early signers. There will be more.

What is the purpose?  That's an open question.

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.