Why we love radio
For 17 years, Live365, a leading online radio broadcasting network, has been an inspiration to content producers around the world, an inspiration that radio can be different and can be anything you want it to be. As Dean Kattari, Director of Broadcasting for Live365 put it: “The true value of Live365 lies in its diversity of content.” I am truly sad about the possibility of Live365 closing down. At this point, we welcome Live365 stations to migrate to our Airtime Pro services. Airtime lead developer Albert Santoni put together a comprehensive blog post to give you all the facts.
I want to use this opportunity to pay respect to the great work that Live365 has done and write a few lines about what makes radio so special to me.
Radio has always been close to my heart. When I was a kid, my father sat down with me to build a crystal radio, without a doubt the most basic radio receiver there is. He taught me how to use a soldering iron and helped me put the handful of parts together. I put on the headset and heard voices coming out of thin air, running through the same wires I had just welded together. It was the closest I ever came to believing in magic.
Many years later, this fascination is still with me. It is not only about the technology, which is very simple and at the same time utterly complicated, but also about how “making radio” can create powerful, diverse networks of people. I was very lucky to have had the chance to learn from some of the most interesting independent radio networks in Indonesia, Nepal and Armenia about the impact radio has on communities, not only the ones listening, but also the ones producing radio programmes. If you are interested in learning more about these projects, you can watch a few short documentaries I filmed and edited (together with documentary filmmaker Philip Scheffner) on Vimeo in our channel “Scattered Frequencies”.
This is the background from which our radio software Airtime was conceived. As radio changed dramatically when the Internet came along, so changed our vision for Airtime and we started the “radio in the cloud”: Airtime Pro. I am very proud that we are not only providing kick-ass software for radio professionals and dedicated amateurs, but are also actively bringing the power of radio to communities. Most recently, we have been creating a network of many dedicated small radio initiatives across the South Caucasus as part of microwav.fm.
If you are affected by the possible closure of Live365, we would be honoured if you decided to migrate your radio station to Airtime Pro. We believe in diversity and the power of radio. We have built our services with a vision in mind: providing beneficial services to independent voices built on open source software. The best place to start finding more information is in our short FAQ about Airtime Pro or to get in touch with our support team directly.