This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site.
In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more!
– wordpress.org/plugins/radio-station
– radiostation.pro
– netmix.com
– tonyzeoli.com
– avlhms.com
– linkedin.com/in/tonyzeoli
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Next week we’re interviewing Matt Ray of the Opencost project.
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Is it really “radio” if it does not radiate from a antenna??
Not to me. YMMV
Is it really a pod cast if an iPod isn’t involved?
Is it really a podcast if a Triffid didn’t cast the pod?
In response to the same question from an earlier comment, the word “podcast” has been adopted to describe a downloadable audio file from na RSS feed. While it started with Apple iPod and the MTV host who invented the “podcast,” the term is simply a useful descriptor if the format.
It’s not actually a podcast unless it originates from the French region of “Pod”. Otherwise it’s just a sparkling audio file.
Yes, it is a “podcast” even if the iPod is not the device you’re listening to it on. The word has evolved define the format as a “podcast,” just like “streaming radio” uses radio when we think of radio as a terrestrial broadcast over the air of a signal from a radio station.
Because streaming describes many ways to push audio and video over the internet without in a smooth manner, when I got into this we just adopted the word “radio” because no one came up with anything better and the broadcast is “radio-like” in that it can emanate using radio station equipment. Back when I stated in the 90s it seemed like the best way to describe what we were doing. Now you have Clubhouse doing “social audio,” but we never coined a term like that to differentiate. Maybe “streaming media,” but that encompasses both audio and video streaming and the industry of streamers pushing media as a whole.
They’re kicking themselves that they didn’t name it Netflix instead and would’ve become billionaires.
“For lack of a consonant, a kingdom was lost.”