Legendary Seattle programmer Bob Case is the process of launching a new Seattle/Tacoma-based company that will concentrate exclusively on streaming audio for radio stations, he told RAIN yesterday.

Case is a 25-year veteran of the radio industry, including PD gigs at KJR/Seattle, KUBE/Seattle, WZGC/Cleveland, and KZZP/Phoenix. More recently, he was VP/Programming for New Century Media in Seattle and Phoenix. He and three partners currently own a group called Bedrock with stations in Seattle, Portland (a move-in), Santa Barbara, and Bend, OR.

Case's new company, StreamAudio.com, will be focused solely on providing audio streaming for radio stations, he said.

According to Case, they plan do it for the first 250 stations they sign at no cost to the station -- literally. (Most other "free" streaming services ask for barter minutes on the client radio stations.)

Case says he's proud of the "Listen & Surf" custom audio player that his firm has designed. "The player was critical to me because I had to find a way to display the artist, title, and CD cover, plus it was critical that I listed what song was coming up next, to build TSL, and then last but certainly not least, to have a player that surfed with the listener.

Case says his firm is "operating out of new offices in Tacoma, with our own servers and DS3's out to the Internet. We have the bandwidth and servers on-site to stream hundreds of stations, and we have all the encoders in stock ready to ship immediately."

One obvious question is this: How can Case's firm afford to provide genuinely free streaming?

Apparently they feel they can do it by retaining rights to the small (233-by-30 pixel) banner ad at the bottom of the tuner. (See the eBay ad at the bottom of the sample KUBE player above (shown 2/3 size).) Client stations, on the other hand, retain the rights to visuals within the larger window, which can be used for CD cover art during songs or clickable "rich media" ads timed to accompany spots.

Try the "Listen & Surf" player by visiting Bedrock's Seattle station, KFNK ("Funky Monkey 104.9" ) here. Visit StreamAudio's website here. Share your observations about Bob's plans here.

Lots of RAIN readers had comments on yesterday's story about the Hiwire streaming audio tuner/player. Click here to read the original story, click on the graphic at left to read readers' comments and opinions, and/or click here to contribute your own thoughts. (Updated 3:30PM CT Friday.)

Yesterday morning, the Washington Post wrote: "Today could be the birth date of a thousand new radio stations. Or the staticky eulogy for a thousand old ones. The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote this morning on establishing a new kind of radio – low-power FM...

"The NAB's technical studies have shown exactly the opposite of the FCC's findings: that low-power stations will bleed onto existing frequencies. 'You can't bend the laws of physics,' says NAB President Edward Fritts. Aiding the NAB's argument is the FCC's failure to test clock radios and Walkman-like radios, which, because of their lower fidelity, would be most susceptible to low-power interference. The NAB estimates that up to 30 percent of listeners use such lo-fi devices..." Read the article here

As you know, it got approved. There may be up to 1,000 of the higher-power 100-watt versions and they may start to arrive by summer. Instead of "-AM" or "-FM," they'll carry the "-LP" suffix. The licenses will be for eight years.

This afternoon, the New York Times wrote, "By summer, hundreds of new low-power radios station could crop up on the FM dial, giving voice to community groups, churches and even novice disc jockeys." Read it here.

More details are in the radio trade publications, including Radio & Records (here), Radio Business Report (here), and Radio Ink (here).

It's ironic, of course, that the FCC is going to hurt the signal quality of broadcast stations just as thousands of individuals and organizations -- including community groups, churches and novice disc jockeys -- are starting Internet-based Webcasts that meet most of the FCC's supposed objectives!



According to sources in the Chicago Internet community, Chicago-based RadioWave.Com has apparently closed on a multi-million first round of outside funding.

RadioWave was spun out of Motorola in late 1998 as a separate but wholly-owned corporation; this round of financing would bring in the firm's first outside investor, with another possibly waiting in the wings. RadioWave recently relocated from Motorola's corporate office campus in Schaumberg to Internet-firm-like loft space in downtown Chicago.




From a story earlier this month entitled "Net Radio: A Virtual Riot of Sites and Sounds. The Web lets you tune into music stations across the world, freeing you from bland local on-air offerings"

The article said, "Radio over the Net comes in two broad categories: regular on-air stations that have an Internet feed, and Internet-only broadcasters. With the first group, you can skip across the country to find the most interesting on-air stations. With the second, you find something even better: a wide variety of good music with no commercials...

"So where do you look for the good stuff? Let's start with the Internet-only broadcasters. There are already a good dozen major ones, many only about a year old..."

The article praised SonicNet's sound quality, the many sub-niche formats of rock at WWW.com, alternative Webcaster 3WK, the ethnic music channels of NetRadio, and KFOG/San Francisco and WZZO/Allentown, among others. It's in the 1/7/00 Business Week here (free to the magazine's subscribers).


The link to last Sunday's New York Times piece on radio and the Web was not functioning in all editions of RAIN this week. If you wanted to read the article and couldn't get to it, the correct link is here.

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