The Role of Internet Radio

Broadcasting over the internet or web casting is one of the many possibilities that the internet has brought to life, essentially it is an audio service transmitted over online platform, and it does not entail traditional transmission methods like wireless means or airwaves.

A streaming medium enables listeners to enjoy hours of their favorite radio content through an unbroken stream of audio. And also online broadcasting is not similar to podcasting which involves downloading as opposed to streaming audio, and the beauty about net radio/web radio is that it allows access to people located in other regions of the world beyond its point of origin.

For example, a UK station like Last.fm reaches out to listeners in over 200 countries, bearing testimony to the potent power of of this form of broadcasting. However, this broadcasting avenue has some restrictive concerns for some channels due to advertising and licensing requirements, for example, Chrysalis of the United Kingdom and the Clear Channel (US) are limited in coverage owing to the above technicalities.

One of the main advantages of web radio is serving immigrant populations who might find the radio content of their host countries unsuited to their generic preferences. And web radio provides them with a way to keep in touch with their home communities and its music genres, e.g, folks from Hong Kong may find UK broadcasts of pop, rock music, dance and other local genres just not their cup of tea.

Radio over internet mainly differs from the traditional radio on the basis of the means of transmission and international accessibility, but the general formatting is more or less the same offering news, sports, talk and a variety of music genres.

The streaming technology of net radio utilizes lossy audio codec and the audio streaming formats include MP3, Windows Media Audio, Vorbis, HE-AAC and Real Audio, and the mode of transport for the bits are the UDP packets and TCP which then play instantly.

The pioneers behind this form of radio transmission began broadcasting a version of their traditional station on the internet in 1994, and it was called the WXYC 89.3 FM of Chapel Hill, NC in the US. An FM radio was connected to a system at Sunsite utilizing a Cornell CU-Seeme Software, this was after thorough testing of bandwidth and the actual broadcast transmission.

Virgin Radio gave Europe its first broadcast in 1996 offering its range of traditional radio programs, it used its FM signal live from the source to simultaneously feed the internet link. These online developments inspired significant media and investor attention with stock offerings shooting up sharply on the back of an online radio craze of the late 1990's.