Net Audio and Productive Noise:
The Second Golden Age of Radio

The movies were supposed to kill radio. TV was supposed to kill the movies and radio. Will Internet radio kill traditional radio? Will streaming video kill streaming audio? If you take a tip from history, it’s evident that we tend to adopt and use everything as long as it retains some unique value. One thing is clear. There is something very valuable about audio information.

The Internet has added some value to the audio medium already. The ways many of us work and organize our days are already being affected by the innovations. In contrast to other technologies like radio and TV, Net audio is on-demand. You can hear it whenever you want to. A large audience now has access to a massive pool of varied content, and new technologies allow you to take it with you.

The medium itself is broadcasting, but it’s technically not radio. Yes, it radiates on the networks we call the Internet, but not in the same way that electrons of wireless radio radiate throughout the ether. A better term, perhaps, is Internet-based audio broadcasting. Keep in mind that the same implements that allow broadcasting (servers and audio configurations for delivery) can provide narrowcasting within an intranet.

On a consumer level, the accessibility and quality of Net audio is approaching a level of maximum utility. If you’ve got a speaker, a sound card and a modem, you can get streaming audio that has satisfactory-to-good quality at 28.8kbps (even 14.4kbps is acceptable). Site traffic seems to be the main impediment to sound quality at 28.8kbps.

It’s easy to get a player like the RealPlayer 4.0. The download is 1.33Mb. It’s also been bundled with the popular browsers Netscape and MSExplorer. Microsoft’s NetShow is a similar product. These products are not only audio players. They’re video and animation systems, as well. For the purposes of this article, we’ll stick to the audio capabilities. Audio is most useful for the widest possible audience of users on 28.8 or 14.4kbps modems. There are multicasting Mbone solutions that are becoming increasingly available for high-speed corporate video conferencing. That’s another story.

Statistically speaking, the prevalence of Net audio players like RealNetworks’ RealPlayer is evidenced by the number of people who have downloaded players from their site. RealNetworks says they’ve accommodated 20 million end-user downloads. In addition, they report that 85,000 Web pages use RealAudio and RealVideo, and that 100,000 hours of live programming are available each week. How many people use their players regularly is up for speculation. John McMullen, one of the Internet’s broadcasting pioneers, estimates usage at 5 to 10 million uses on any given day (uses being measured as individual audio file transfers).

Dozens of content publishers from ABC to Warner Brothers supply online content for the players. Add to that the low barriers to entry for organizations and individuals to set up their own broadcast servers, and you’ve got a solid foundation of content as well as massive potential for more information outlets. "I believe in it," says McMullen. "This hands back to the people a means to having a worldwide audience."

For the purposes of information, understanding and enrichment, Net audio is being widely adopted. As distinct from music and entertainment audio, information broadcasts allow users to gather information in a true multi-tasking manner. Simply put, you can listen while you work. For example, a typical routine for Matt McLaren, 3Com national account manager, is to log onto his network, collect his morning email and then return messages while c|net streams Brian Cooley’s technology newscast over his speakers. Understandably, technology news is one of the more popular audio commodities on the Net. All the while, Matt schedules appointments and manages expenses in other programs. The player typically hogs about 15k of the dial-up connection but not much desktop program memory. Small-sized emails easily send and receive while the audio streams. Morning routines like this are highly common within the information technology world.

Busy work goes hand in hand with on-demand streaming Net audio. Christian Harper of Conners Communications (more on this company below) puts it well: "A lot of the time, our eyes are busy, but our minds are free...We’re rapidly moving into this age where people who have information faster have the edge." Using your ears is one way to keep up.

As consumers of important information, we’ve got to fill the channels to our brains efficiently. Consider your brain a computer with inputs similar to phone line, CD-ROM and network. Listening to audio information while cleaning your file system makes sense in terms of efficient uptake of data.

Content resources on the Net are quite prolific and growing in abundance. The high-profile mainstays of news and tech info are c|net Radio (updated three times daily), ABC News (updated at 9 a.m. PT), FOX News (updated at 8 a.m. PT) and MSNBC (updated five times daily). The DailyBriefing site is a good place to find mainstream and alternative news sources in an indexed format. RealNetworks also has an indexed listing of their content.

One reason to get your hands on Microsoft’s NetShow player is Audionet. It’s a large collection of new and archived content, some of which is available only via NetShow. Many of the files are available in both NetShow and RealAudio format. This gives you an opportunity to test out and compare the players side by side. Audionet is a seemingly endless stockpile of sound files.

More links, culled from an extensive search engine session, follow. Brown University put lectures online in RealAudio format. First Capital Services, a financial organization, will be offering its seminars in a "radio" format online. The University of Indiana School of Law offers speeches, lectures and seminars online. Timecast, the same company that sponsors DailyBriefing, has another site which indexes 528 live broadcast stations. This includes everything from college music stations to religious oratory. The University of North Carolina has an archived lecture on Jane Austen up. There’s even a site which describes how to create and implement content in RealAudio format.

The content available on the Internet is growing rapidly, and the number of computers capable of receiving audio is huge, but there’s a limitation to Net Audio. One of the great things about conventional radio is that it’s portable. Until a recent breakthrough, the only way you could have a "transistor" Net radio would be to have a great cellular connection to your laptop. The fact is, that’s not very common or reliable.

So what’s the breakthrough? A company called Audible has manufactured Net Audio recorders that capture RealAudio files from Web sites and store them on a nifty little hand-held module. You can then take the portable three-and-a-half-ounce unit with you wherever you like. It holds two hours’ worth of files and plays back through its own headphones, any stereo tuner or any radio. The audible.com site boasts 10,000 hours of audio, including books on tape, lectures, non-fiction, TV, radio, business and self-help content. They are giving the huge sites like Audionet and DailyBriefing a run for their money in terms of available content. However, you’ve got to pay for it to download it. The storage device itself costs a couple hundred dollars, new release books go for $9.95 per download, back list titles are $6.95 and talk shows are $1.95. Lengths, formats and pricing within those ranges vary.

But that’s not all. "We’ve got a deal with RealNetworks where soon all RealAudio files will be in a downloadable format," says Audible’s Christian Harper. "That means you can store free content and use it later. You could, for example, store Clinton’s State of the Union address and play it back at your leisure."

Net Audio is also playing an increasingly important role in the corporate market. Companies are capturing the attention of their employees by issuing memos, bulletins and news via audio files. Network users can listen to them at any time, streamed straight from their server. In Fall 1996, Intel put their annual shareholders meeting in RealAudio format and synched that with a PowerPoint-style photo and graphical presentation. The screens were scripted in HTML to coincide with the streaming audio.

In addition to all this innovation and availability of quality content, there are some profound social implications attached to the Net Audio phenomenon. Any discussion of the topic would be remiss to exclude such subjects. The very nature of the Internet allows for democratic access to media. With this forum and these tools, virtually every voice can step up to the collective podium. The best illustration of this power involves December 1996’s Radio Bosnia incident. This story comes up in every discussion of Net radio. Sam Tucker, publisher of WebActive, an activist publication group sponsored by RealNetworks, was involved in the whole scenario along with John McMullen of GLOradio (and formerly of RealNetworks). In brief summary, Slobodan Milosevic shut down Belgrade Radio B92 in response to street demonstrations protesting the election results he disregarded. B92 was broadcasting the protests. Mostly via email, according to Tucker, they put a plan into action that would bring the broadcast to the Net, thus circumventing the need for the radio tower. RealNetworks got an audio server up and the station was online. "Twenty-four hours later," says Tucker, "the radio transmitter was turned back on."

All things considered, Net Audio has tremendous value today. In the no-man’s-land between bandwidth standardization dilemmas, radio is enjoying a second golden age. While the rest of the world beams about serving up two-hour movies from multi-processor servers, take comfort in the fact that audio is here now, it’s useful and the quality is excellent for spoken information.