from the New York Times
April 9, 1998
Have You Listened to Your Computer Lately?
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
V ery early one recent morning, Rob Gibson was having a hankering
for home. For almost a month Gibson, the executive producer and
director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, had been far away from New York
on tour with the center's celebrated jazz orchestra. After a
concert, he found himself sitting in his hotel room in Adelaide, a
coastal town in southwestern Australia, reading e-mail on his
laptop computer.
One message snagged Gibson's attention. A friend who is the general
manager of a jazz radio station in Newark urged him to do something
he hardly imagined possible: listen to the station, one of his
favorites, 10,000 miles away through his computer.
"I said to myself, 'Let me try this,'" recalled Gibson, who
described himself as "not a super tech person." He entered the
Internet address of WBGO-FM into his laptop, and it honed in on the
station's site on the World Wide Web. A couple of mouse clicks
later, to Gibson's astonishment, jazz sizzled from his computer's
tiny speakers.
"It was extremely hip," Gibson said. To be exact, it was Lee
Morgan's mellifluous trumpet that mellowed the early morning in
Gibson's Australian hotel room last month before he slipped off to
sleep.
Gibson discovered what millions of Web cruisers are learning: the
Internet, a computer-generated medium that was dominated first by
text, is surprisingly well wired to transmit the great-granddaddy
of wireless communications -- radio.
After a century of tuning in old-fashioned analog waves that made
radio, well, radio, the ever more digital world is translating some
of those waves into the 1's and 0's that makes up the language of
computers. The result: hundreds of radio stations, from Japan to
Johannesburg, from Brazil to Boston and beyond, are being heard on
personal computers as well as conventional radios.
In fact, Imagine Radio, a new network of more than 20 radio
stations, delivers news, talk and music programs to its listeners
exclusively over the Internet. Moreover, the network, by using its
own software tuner (available for free download at the site), lets
listeners rate what they hear and thus affect the stations' play
lists.
"The lines are being redrawn about what a device can and cannot do
or know," said Brad Porteus, managing director of Imagine Radio,
which is based in Brisbane, Calif., near San Francisco. "We thought
it was a good time to try to break some new ground in terms of
evolution."
Quincy Jones, the longtime jazz musician and entertainment magnate,
certainly appreciates the potential of Internet radio. Earlier this
year, he started Qradio. It is a multimedia Web site that carries
live connections to four of South Africa's most popular radio
stations.
Along with background on musicians, many of them heard over South
African radio, Qradio uses the Internet to promote and sell their
music. Most of their CD's are not generally available in record
stores in the United States.
Adam Clayton Powell 3d, vice president for technology and programs
of the Freedom Forum, an advocacy group for journalistic freedom
and education, said the line between what is his radio and what is
his computer has so blurred that he actually uses his computer as a
radio in his office in Arlington, Va. He said he regularly uses
Internet radio to listen to news and music, which he said he
"otherwise would be unable to get even in recorded form."
"I love it, absolutely love it," he said of Internet radio, which
he also uses to make inexpensive broadcasts of Freedom Forum
discussions and programs. Much like publishing on the Internet, the
relative cost to broadcast on the World Wide Web is modest.
Mark Hardie, a senior analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge,
Mass., who has closely watched the development of Internet radio,
said he expected to see radio on the Web expand and improve. The
reasons, he said, are compelling for both the listener and the
broadcaster.
"When a radio station in the real world chooses to encode and
broadcast its signal over the Internet, it expands beyond the
geographical boundaries of the station," he said, "including its
audience that is now worldwide."
The upshot? Broadcast radio will eventually be forced to adapt,
much like it was forced to change with the advent of television
more than 50 years ago, said Jae Kim, an analyst with Paul Kagan &
Associates, a Carmel, Calif.-based research and publishing company
that analyzes the communications and entertainment industries.
"This will not destroy broadcast radio," he said. "What is probably
going to happen more and more is that broadcast radio is going to
shoehorn itself into being used in certain capacities."
Kim suggested that radios will be used when people do not have or
do not want to have computers: peak drive time or exercise time,
when people like joggers want their radios with them.
Doubts about Internet radio have generally transmuted into a
supportive hum, to a lesser extent than the doubts about Internet
television, which suffers because of the relatively poor video
quality of its images.
Still, no one knows just how many people are listening. One measure
is the use of Real Player, the pre-eminent software used to deliver
audio and video broadcasts on the Internet; the makers of the
program say 40 million of its players have been downloaded to
consumers free over the Internet, while 60,000 consumers have
bought a more sophisticated version.
Real Networks, which is based in Seattle and makes the industry
standard, Real Player 5.0, also provides its users with Timecast.
It works very much like a typical Internet search engine, except
that it primarily searches through more than 600 stations,
organized into 20 categories. While Timecast has about 600 stations
to search, many more are not in the Timecast engine, and new
stations are frequently coming on line. Other stations may be found
on other search engines, for example, one run by Audionet. And
there is always word of mouth, say, from a friend who has
discovered that a hometown radio station can now be enjoyed far
away from home.
Practically any multimedia computer bought in the last several
years -- that is, one equipped with sound -- is able to play radio
once the software has been loaded. Only a double click of a mouse
on the station's name or icon launches Real Player, making an
ordinary multimedia computer sound like a tinny AM radio. Most of
the radio stations do not broadcast in stereo.
At first blush, however, the thought of listening to the radio on a
computer might seem like an idea borrowed from an old Rube Goldberg
cartoon in which mind-numbingly complex contraptions are invented
to perform very simple tasks.
For a generation that has grown up listening to the sterile
perfection of music on compact disks, the sound broadcast over the
Internet, varying vastly from station to station, is occasionally
marred by static breaks, and worse, total dropouts of sound lasting
around 3 to 10 seconds.
In a random test using a 28.8-baud modem (the suggested minimum),
three stations based in and outside of the United States, played
for more than 30 minutes without a drop out of signal. A fourth
station, based in St. Petersburg, Russia, had three dropouts in its
first 10 minutes. Using much higher-speed Internet connections,
predictably, yields much better sound quality.
For example, Accent 4 Live, a classical station based in Paris,
delivered music in stereo as it streamed data at 80 kilobytes per
second. Internet radio more commonly delivers its music at 16 to 20
kbps and the difference shows. Accent 4 Live has to use expensive
equipment to create such high-quality sound, which not every
station does.
Skeptics of Internet radio have also been quick to note that
computer users are being asked to push their $2,000 to $4,000
machines to essentially do something a $5 radio could accomplish
with a turn of a dial.
But not really, said Mark Cuban, 39, the president of Audio Net,
the Dallas-based broadcast network that is a major player in
putting sound and pictures on the World Wide Web. The analogy
raises his hackles.
"That's like saying that you are taking a $1,500 big-screen
television and making it do what the admission price to the ball
park will cost you," said Cuban, who in 1995 co-founded the company
that chiefly raises revenue by selling advertising and charging
businesses to broadcast their programs. "That's absolutely crazy."
The issue, Cuban and his supporters say, is access, a magic word in
the computer kingdom. By digitizing radio programs and placing them
on the Internet, not only has geographic distance been made
irrelevant, but so have some of the limitations of time, note
proponents of the technology.
For example, news, sports, talk radio and some television newscasts
on the Internet -- as well as some music radio programs are stored
in archives.
Adam Zelinka, director of site programming for N2K, a lower
Manhattan-based an online music entertainment company that operates
Jazz Central Station that in turn puts Newark's WBGO on the
Internet, agrees. Internet radio has made programs, he said,
accessible to many listeners.
"People all over the country, all around the world, are tuning in
to us," Zelinka said. "We constantly get e-mail responses: 'Thank
you for giving us this kind of a radio in Iowa.'"
Some of those responses, Zelinka said, have contained financial
pledges to the listener-supported jazz station. Some of the
contributions have come from away as New Zealand, he said.
"That, more than anything else," he added, "is proof of the
concept."
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Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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