Streaming Radio
Our radio show currently broadcasts live three hours a week on Thursdays. That leaves 165 hours of air time we could be filling with music, commentary and shows from other sources. To that end, I'm launching a radio station this weekend filled with music and programming I enjoy. With any luck a few listeners will like it too. I know a number of you reading this are independent musicians or aspiring radio hosts who would like to share something with the community. Please drop me a line (the email link is in the sidebar) with details about your creative venture. While I won't guarantee playback of everything submitted, I can certainly guarantee we won't play your stuff if you don't submit it. I can't promise fame and fortune. You will receive attribution for your efforts, which may lead to bigger and better things.
Throughout the process of setting up the radio station I've been testing several software packages to handle the process. I wanted something more robust than the standard Shoutcast stuff so I'm taking a serious look at both SAMS Broadcaster or DRS 2006. Both can be pushed to a Windows Media Streaming Server, which was my number one requirement. I'm currently leaning toward SAMS at the moment, because it looks to have better live interruption features, but it also is considerably more expensive. This is one of those cases where the features likely justify the price. I'll let you know what route I go once the radio station is live.
On Monday and Tuesday, I'm joining Chris Pirillo and Lenn Pryor at the Blog Business Summit for a panel discussion on Media Blogging: Podcasting and Beyond. We'll be demonstrating how to acquire podcasts, the tools required to create your own podcast, as well as ways to make money through podcasting (it is a business summit after all). I'm looking forward to meeting Lenn; he's the guy in charge of Channel 9 at Microsoft. Hopefully he'll be sharing secrets on publishing frequent video updates to a corporate Web site. If you happen to be attending the conference, be sure and look me up. If you aren't attending, I'm going to do my best to obtain rights to distribute an audio version of the panel discussion I'm on, but that's entirely up to the conference coordinators.