If Cerys Matthews, lead singer with the Welsh band Catatonia, had grown up with access to Internet radio, things could be very different. As it was, Matthews (so we're told) was brought up in a remote Welsh valley with no radio or television reception and, despite escaping the influence of popular music, still managed to become a pop star.
Access to the Internet could well have meant a different sound or influence for the band. It would have opened up the possibilities of not only listening to local and national radio stations online, but also thousands of talk and music radio channels from across the globe.
Internet radio is everything that FM radio in Ireland is not. It caters for the individual, with a clutter of niche and specialist radio stations as readily available as stations dedicated to chart music. There are so many stations out there that it is difficult to know how many are talk-based and how many are dedicated to music alone.
Accessing an online radio station is fine if you have the URL. But finding a niche station or a station in a certain area definitely requires the help of sites such as radiotower.com, whatsonwebradio.com, etc. Both of these give the option of searching by country and genre.
Live streams from real and Internet-only stations are broadcast, in most cases, 24 hours a day, though occasionally they're restricted to certain times. Audio can often cut in and out and this annoying phenomenon is usually caused by network or Internet traffic. Although one of the ideas behind Internet radio is to listen while you work, if you're downloading large graphics or video files, surfing to other sites, or opening multiple browsers, you reduce the amount of available bandwidth and cause errors in streaming the audio.
Still, the possibilities are vast. Ex-pats lonely for Ireland can tune into local radio stations such as Waterford Local Radio and Galway Bay FM, which both have live streams. Irish pirate radio stations and most local radio stations stream their content over the Internet 24-7. RTE transmits three radio stations live over the Internet using RealAudio technology: Radio One, 2FM and Lyric FM. A wide range of daily and weekly updated radio clips are also available on the server. The joys of archiving online radio was most recently evident when Dave Fanning's U2 interview was archived, meaning U2 fans everywhere could listen to the interview, over and over, at any time. (The interview was also divided into sections for easier access.)
Across the world, Internet radio takes up where broadcasting's licensing laws leave off. It fills the gaps, offering more interesting music and subjects, and also provides a legitimate "on-air" option for pirates. There are two different types of "broadcasting" online: a live stream can be transmitted from a real radio station and also from the Internet only. (A webcast is either audio or video, which is broadcast on the web exclusively and does not have to be one continuous stream.)
Two Irish Internet-only radio stations that are targeting the ex-pat and Irishinterest market are LiveIreland.com, which broadcasts two channels of Irish music (traditional and contemporary) and DublinRadioNews.com, which will be launched in coming weeks.
The latter is run by Flycatcher.ie, part of the radio family that includes Dublin's FM104; DublinRadioNews.com will be a 24-hour rolling news station, broadcasting Irish news and talk shows to an international audience. Its sister online station is WOD1 (see `A Day in the Life'), which caters for the young dance market.
There are a number of companies operating in Ireland that work in the audio and video streaming industry. Much of their work is based around webcasts of events such as awards, speeches, sports events and festivals.
There are a lot of US sites in particular that offer broadband streaming of televisions, films and video. Netbroadcaster.com lets surfers browse through a selection of movies, televisions, music, sport and radio. One site, LikeTelevision.com has served 11 million videos since the beginning of this year. However, the closest Ireland has to an online television channel is the recently launched No 54 (see below).
Although RTE happily provides live radio streams, RTE television does not supply a live video stream of any of its programmes. However, in the news section of the RTE site, viewers are given the option on watching the news and Prime Time. Two Dublin pirate radio stations, Phantom FM and XFM, have in-studio web cameras so listeners can watch as well as listen to the station's live streams on the Internet.
As any user can testify, however, the quality of pictures is a problem - and a problem beyond the control of the providers of the video stream. The problem is bandwidth and speed and the lack of it in this country.
Online audio has been much more accessible than online video for most Irish web surfers. Here the speed at which we can access the Internet is just not fast enough for it to resemble television as we know it. Most residential Internet users would only have 56Kbps (Kilobits per second) modems; Eircom's hi-speed ISDN lines provide just double that at 128Kbps. Many US sites only give users a choice between accessing video on a 100Kbps modem or 300Kbps modem. This is not an option for most Irish surfers: when I attempted to watch an episode of TV classic The Beverly Hillbillies, the result, with a 56k modem, was audio accompanied by a series of still pictures; the early days of the moving picture, a century ago, were a lot better.
Ireland is still waiting for the widespread introduction of two options that will bring Ireland's net viewing up to speed with other places in the developed world: cable modem and asynchronous digital subscriber line (ASDL), where download speed is faster than upload.
Fast and usually free Internet access in the United States makes high-quality online audio and video access a doddle. However, here we are still in the early days - the equivalent of crystal sets at the dawn of the radio age.
