“FLAME OF THE INTERNET”

It seemed easy enough ... we'd start a radio program for the Internet called Geek of the Week and people would ftp audio files onto their workstations to listen. Sure, a half-hour sound file was 30 megabytes, but with a little radio production work, some digitizing, and a few ftp-based distribution chains to get the data staged on sites around the Internet, this sounded like a simple enough thing to do.

Well, the Geek of the Week metaphor morphed into Internet Talk Radio, the New York Times wrote the project up on their front page, and we went on the air April Fools Day of 1993 (seriously). Before the year was out, we had listeners in a few dozen countries and were chewing up some serious bandwidth. We reached agreements to be able to send out National Press Club luncheons, joined the Public Radio Satellite System so we could syndicate shows like TechNation, and negotiated Internet rights agreements with Harper Collins, NASA, and programs like KPFA's Hell's Bells. We focused on negotiating rights agreements with groups for Internet broadcast, and knocked on many doors that had never heard the word "Internet," such as asking BMI and ASCAP for Internet radio station licenses and filing for Congressional Press Credentials (we got the latter but not the former, but then that nut hasn't been cracked yet.)

After the NY Times gave us our 15 nanoseconds of fame, we incorporated IMS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit so we could push the medium as fast as technology and policy would let us, focusing on the broader needs of the public and the Internet instead of revenue targets in a business plan.

URL: http://museum.media.org/radio/