So far in Russia, no one seriously took up the description of the major milestones in the development of such media as Internet radio. In my opinion, this is a serious gap in knowledge that has been successfully developed for over 20 years and is pleasing to the ears of tens of millions of Internet users. I decided to fill this gap, since I have been studying this phenomenon for a long time and have saved up an invoice that is not found anywhere in Russian-speaking sources.
Audio content, and after it, broadcasting, quickly began to master the media environment of the Internet after the text and static image - literally from the beginning of the 90s. And over the past 20 years, the rapid evolution of web radio has undergone major transformations and typological reincarnations in order to meet the demands of not just listeners, but listening users. Interactivity and co-participation in the communication process have become characteristic features of new online media. Obviously, this mediaphenomenon is an important and relevant topic for scientific study. After all, Internet broadcasting is not only a new kind of traditional radio, but also a new type of QMS, experiencing an active period of its development and acquiring specific forms of interaction with the audience and impact on the public consciousness. Despite the existence of a number of scientific works on the characteristics of the typology and functioning of online broadcasting, it is worth noting that so far no attempt has been made to more closely examine the historical aspect of the emergence and development of this online media both in the world and in Russia. In this report, we will try to fill this research gap.
The date of appearance of the first radio on the Internet can be considered April 1, 1993, when the American non-profit public research corporation IMS (The Internet Multicasting Service - “Multicast Internet Services”) launched its new project - Internet Talk Radio (“Internet Talk radio"). The founder of this corporation and the founder of the progenitor of web radio stations was Carl Malamud, an American economist, writer and well-known information technology expert in the West. A month before the official launch of Internet Talk Radio, the influential publication The New York Times devoted a separate article to a detailed coverage of the upcoming event in the article Turning the Desktop PC Into a Talk Radio Medium, in which a number of experts, including Karl Malamud, spoke about the technical possibility of broadcasting radio on the network and the demand for this media platform among users [1]. As the creators themselves describe their brainchild, Internet Talk Radio did not broadcast live (in real time), but represented a specific ftp-server c URL, where there were links to sound files of programs of various thematic focus, created by radio journalists specifically for Internet Talk Radio . Anyone could go to this server and download or listen to their chosen program in a convenient format (there were three: .au, .gsm, .ra). The first radio program that appeared on the Internet Talk Radio server was the weekly updated program of Karl Malamud’s Geek Of The Week (“Computer Smart Week”), in which he interviewed prominent engineers and programmers of the time. Later, the first Internet radio offered its listeners-visitors a large list of programs about music, politics, culture, history of mass communications, show business, etc. During the year of work, thousands of listeners from several dozen countries became visitors to the Internet Talk Radio server, and the site’s editors were able to conclude cooperation agreements with major manufacturers and suppliers of radio products in USA - KPFA, Public Radio Satellite System. The site was missing graphics, illustrations, forums, chat rooms and other interactive forms of contact with the audience, except the editorial email address. And although Internet Talk Radio cannot be called a full-fledged radio station on the Internet, because its operation did not have such an important feature of broadcasting as direct streaming of audio data “in real time” or live broadcast, yet otherwise this server already remotely resembled those sites of online stations which will subsequently be massively distributed in the world wide web space.
The next historical breakthrough in online broadcasting can be considered on January 1, 1994, when the aforementioned IMS corporation in the Internet is a new project - RT-FM radio station broadcasting 24 hours a day. Moreover, visitors to the server of this station had the opportunity not only to listen to live broadcasts, but to download the archives of some programs or live broadcasts. In this case, IMS employees focused on live broadcasting: RT-FM conducted live audio (and even video) broadcasts from various conferences and round tables, and also broadcast the live broadcast of the meeting of the Joint Economic Committee ), where among other issues addressed by users from the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, this station ceased to exist, so today it is difficult to accurately describe its content and web design, but the recordings of some programs are still available in the IMS archives.
The first concert broadcast on the Internet was the performance of the Severe Tire Damage group, which took place on June 24, 1993. And in November 1994, the American group Rolling Stones gave the first large-scale multicast concert in the World Wide Web. Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the group, opened the online performance with the following words: “I want to especially welcome everyone who has logged on to the Internet today and connected to M-bone (an experimental virtual network to provide multicast traffic on the Internet, developed in 1992 in the USA - . author). And I hope this will not turn off. ”[2]
On November 7, 1994, the student radio station WXYC of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), broadcasting in the city on the FM frequency of 89.3 MHz, became the first traditional radio station to announce the launch of its broadcast on the Internet [3]. For this purpose, the CU-SeeMe video conferencing program developed at Cornell University was used. Test broadcasts and bandwidth tests of the staff of this student radio station began in August 1994. At about the same time, the radio station WREK (91.1 FM) from Atlanta (USA), which used CyberRadio1's own software, developed the webcast.
For nearly two years, Washington's Internet Talk Radio and experimental students dominated the emerging space of Internet sound media resources. They didn’t have great popularity among users, because those who wanted to listen to the release of the program had to spend more than one hour to download content. In those years, DSL data transmission technology was not yet available to ordinary users who had to rely on a slow dial-up connection through public telephone networks. The situation has changed the former top manager of the corporation "Microsoft" Rob Glazer, who in 1994 founded his own company - Progressive Networks. In 1995, Progressive Networks released RealAudio software and made it free for download. RealAudio has significantly improved the speed, quality of transmission and storage of sound on the Internet. The program of Rob Glazer used digital compression, which accelerated the process of transmitting information by compressing the size of each file. In addition, RealAudio had the functionality not only to transmit, but also to store data, which allowed Internet listeners to return to the already passed broadcasts (the so-called principle of “delayed listening”), not limited to live broadcasts. For the first time in the history of media, web radio users could listen to their favorite morning program without waking up for it at 6 am. The RealAudio program has played an important role in the evolution of Internet broadcasting, significantly advancing the technology of streaming audio data [4]. In the end, it made corporations such as Nullsoft and Microsoft make streaming audio players free to download. And after the software for receiving streaming audio broadcasting on the Internet became publicly available, a noticeable increase in the number of web radio stations began.
In 1996, Edward Lyman created Sonicwave.com, the first American Internet radio station, officially licensed by organizations such as ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) for online broadcasting 24 hours per day. In March 1996, Virgin Radio - London became the first European radio station that launched the simultaneous round-the-clock retransmission of its FM signal on the Internet [5].
Serious attention of leading media companies and Internet radio investors began to attract only towards the end of the 90s. As in the case of any new technological trend in which the commercial potential is viewed, investor interest in Internet radio has formed a competitive market.
In 1998, the New York Times told its readers about the well-known webcasting company Broadcast.com [6]. The idea of ​​creating such a company (initially called Audionet) came to the head of Mark Kyubana and Todd Wagner in 1995, when they began to relay one of the Dallas radio stations on the Internet using a friend’s computer in the bedroom. Gradually, the passion developed into a business that worked on a new principle of monetization for the mass media market. By 1998, Broadcast.com offered 345 radio stations to its customers. In exchange for the fact that this web resource helped traditional broadcasting stations to expand audience coverage at the expense of Internet users, it received a certain number of commercial “slots” in their broadcasting network for sale to advertisers. Also, the company could sell audio ads that were broadcast to web listeners before they connected to the online broadcast of the selected program. In addition, Broadcast.com was selling banner ads that users could see on computer screens while listening to the broadcast.
And in 1998, the initial public offering of Web radio broadcasts.com on the stock exchange set a record price increase among stock offers at the time in the United States. The offering price was set at $ 18, but Broadcast.com started the first day of trading with $ 68 per share. Thus, the market value of the company at this share price was more than 1 billion US dollars. True, the company could not competently take advantage of this exchange success and continued to suffer losses. As a result, on July 20, 1999, the Internet giant Yahoo! acquired the resource Broadcast.com for 5.7 billion US dollars.
After the DSL and broadband Internet access changed the outdated dial-up telephone connection, Internet radio began to gain popularity, especially at the dawn of the new millennium - in 2000. Most Internet radio stations improved the quality of streaming broadcasting as the bandwidth increased significantly and became more available to ordinary consumers. Thanks to new technologies, Internet users were able to listen to regional radio stations from around the world. Every year, an increasing number of web stations could provide a stream of audio data between 64 kbps and 128 kbps, approaching the sound quality of CD players. Some traditional radio stations decided to completely transfer their broadcasting to the Internet. According to official documents of the US Government, from 2001 to 2004. 335 traditional radio stations registered initial notifications of digital broadcasting of sound recordings (as required by the Code of Federal Regulations of the United States). And this figure does not reflect the total number of radio stations that streamed from other countries or stations based and operated exclusively on the Internet. By 2004, the most popular directories of online radio stations (www.web-radio.com,
www.radio-locator.com ,
www.realaudio.com ) offered more than 15,000 links to the most diverse typological web broadcasters, and about 4,000 of them accounted for the American segment of the Internet. Research company The Bridge Ratings estimates that out of an estimated 168 million Americans using wireless technology, 56 million, or nearly one-third, listen to the radio on the Internet at least once a week. And in the coming years, this number will continue to grow.
In the Russian segment of the Internet, the first experiments on webcasting were made in 1994, when musician Vasily Shumov (the CENTER group) created the Radio Council Council website. It was an interactive radio that was recorded. The broadcasts were collected interviews of different students in Los Angeles, who shared their impressions of America [7]. In 1995, the Moscow Maximum radio station (www.maximum.ru) was the first in Russia to open its website [8]. Initially, there was no streaming on this resource - it was a static advertising website with a small number of pages and hyperlinks. In 1996, the Europa Plus radio station organized the broadcast of the program of Artemy Troitsky “Dostoevsky FM” via the Internet simultaneously with a regular broadcast, creating a special website for this [9]. Almost at the same time, Radio Silver Rain launched its page on the Runet. Thus, unlike the United States of America, in Russia, the first radio sites were only representative offices of major metropolitan off-line broadcasters.
The first Russian web radio, which started broadcasting exclusively on the World Wide Web, The Internet Radio, was organized as part of the creative team of the metropolitan commercial station, which was considered one of the most progressive in its environment. But it was precisely the pressure of capital and commercial obstacles that forced some of the staff of the metropolitan Radio 101 to leave offline and create the “radio of their dreams” on RuNet. In the summer of 2000 a trademark was registered, and also the first in Russia certificate of registration of an Internet radio station. It is noteworthy that Internet 101 was the first to sign a contract with ROMC (a division of the Russian Authors ’Society) that legalized the right to use music on the Internet. On October 3, 2000, directly at the Internet 2000 exhibition, Internet Radio switched from fully automated broadcasting to live broadcasting.
Another Russian web radio, “Special Radio”, was created on December 1, 2001, it is located at the following URL -
www.specialradio.ru . The first broadcast in the MP3 Shoutcast format was held on January 1, 2002. On July 1, 2002, the number of buttons (a, respectively, and broadcast channels) increased to five (1 - main broadcast, 2 - urban romance, 3 - Russian rock and pop, 4 - French music, 5 - "metal" music). November 5, 2002 - “Special Radio” received a license from the Press Ministry, and by the beginning of 2004 there were already 13 buttons on the main page. Today there are 23 such broadcast buttons on the web resource 23.
Since then, more and more servers began to appear in the Russian segment of the Internet, the main multimedia component of which is the transmission of a stream of audio data in real time or the retransmission of an off-air station. And at this stage, radio in RuNet manifests itself in a large variety of forms, requiring thorough study and scientific analysis.
Literature:
1. Markoff J. Turning the Desktop PC Into a Talk Radio Medium // New York Times. New York, NY: Mar 4, 1993. pg. A1, 2 pgs
2. Peter H. Lewis (February 8, 1995). "Peering Out a 'Real Time' Window." New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-09. -
www.nytimes.com/1995/02/08/business/business-technology-peering-out-a-real-time-window.html
3. WXYC, History -
wxyc.org/about/history
4. Josh Quittner (1995-05-01). "Radio Free Cyberspace". Time. Retrieved 2009-03-05. -
content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0 , 9171,982874,00.html
5. Franc Kozamernik and Michael Mullane “An Introduction to Internet Radio”. European Broadcasting Union (EBU). 26 October 2005. Retrieved 2009-03-30. -
www.ebu.ch/fr/technical/trev/trev_304-webcasting.pdf
6. Saul Hansell (July 20, 1998). "Broadcast.com Faces Risks After Strong Initial Offering". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-11-23.
7. Alexey Makarenkov. Igromania No. 12 (99) 2005. -
www.igromania.ru/articles/47679/Televidenie_i_radio_cherez_internet.htm
8. Birger P. Radio in the Network: already almost business // Inf. - 2001. â„–21 (165). - URL: [http://www.ibusiness.ru/offline/2001/165/10237/]
9. Radio journalism / Ed. AA Sherel. - M., 2000; Smirnov V.V. Forms of broadcasting. M., 2002.
10. Kevin Savetz, Neil Randall, and Yves Lepage “MBONE: Multicasting Tomorrow's Internet” 1996, 1998 -
www.savetz.com/mbone
11. Media.org - museum.media.org/radio