Month: June 2007
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Ripping Video Streams with Real Player 11 beta
The beta of Real Player 11 came out the other day, for Windows only, and I have installed it and fooled around a bit. I do have to report that it does what it advertises: it very easily rips online video and saves it to your hard drive. From YouTube to streams coming off our…
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Paste Discovers Pirate Radio
Paste magazine profiles Pirate Cat Radio’s Monkey Man, writing as if writer John Clarke Jr. alone had rediscovered pirate radio after its supposed “Pump Up the Volume” heyday in the early 90s. The article has nothing new to offer, cribbing its FCC enforcement stats from DIYmedia’s Enforcement Action Database without giving a full citation or…
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Taking Another Stab at Restoring LPFM
After the FCC created the low-power FM radio service in 2000, Congressional Republicans in the pocket of the NAB made a last-minute backroom maneuver to add a major restriction to the service in a budget bill. The restriction requires 100-watt LPFM stations to be spaced on the dial the same as full-power stations as large…
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Distributor Death Takes Down Another Indie Mag
After publishing 80 issues, the great independent culture and politics magazine Punk Planet has announced its closing. According to a front-page post on PP’s website by Daniel Sinker there are several factors contributing to its demise, “bad distribution deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of subscribers.” The bankruptcy of major distributors is a problem…
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The Rise of Community Radio in India
Community radio is very new to India, only recently legalized by the government. It shows a lot of promise, but there are also potential problems. Jaggi Singh and Emmanuel Madan are producing a series of radio programs exploring the rise of this new community media in India for CKUT in Montreal. Jaggi and Emmanuel were…
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Hello Great Barrington
Just learned of another new affiliate to the radio show. Berkshire Community Radio, WBCR-LP 97.7 FM in Great Barrington, MA, has been carrying the program, bringing the number of broadcast affiliates to 12. Not bad, considering my main means of promotion is just this website. If you work with a non-profit, non-commercial, community or public…
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Vivoleum…. is made out of… PEOPLE!
The Yes Men struck again. This time, Big Oil was their target, hitting GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta today. Posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives, they presented their plan for what to do with all the human casualties that will result from the energy policies of…
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Real’s New Survival Technique is Stream Ripping and Fair Use
I have no idea how I missed the big announcement at the end of May that Real’s next media player will feature the ability to record media streams in a whole host of formats — most notably, YouTube’s Flash video content. (As a tangent, the way I found out is kind of interesting — it’s…
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The Early Days of Web Radio
Jose at Arcane Radio Trivia briefly traces the beginning of internet radio, which is now nearly 14 years old (older than DVDs, in fact). However, I do have one addendum/correction. Jose says that KPIG was the first commercial station to broadcast on the web, starting in 1995. But there was a station here in ‘geek-land,…