The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Glenn Williams – Host of the Radio Wammo, Kiwi FM

“Around 2003-2004, I’d been doing the breakfast show on RDU for two or three years and I was starting to look at how I could broadcast outside the studio. I think RDU had broadcast special weeks from the Dux de Lux in Christchurch, broadcasting bands playing live there. But you needed these big Codec, really expensive equipment that you had to hire and they were thousands and thousands of dollars – and you needed a Codec on each side, so one at the studio and one down at the Dux – and then they were connected through an ISDN line, 64kbits, get a stereo connection and they were always dropping. They worked most of the time but they were just a big pain and you needed people to operate at each end. But with the faster speeds of 2003-2004, I started to figure that we could use the Internet to do that. I’d been playing with Skype doing voice calls. So I started experimenting with sending audio from home to the station and eventually one Christmas, in 2004, I plucked up the courage to do a Christmas Eve show from home. I had a warehouse apartment in High Street in Christchurch and the connection seemed pretty good. I was able to send a stereo signal that was almost live – I think there was maybe a five second delay from home to the studio – and also via VNC, work the computers also back at the studio. So if I was moving the mouse at home, it would be moving the mouse at work so I could trigger off the next songs and the ads. I totally pulled it off. I had a band playing at home in the living room, a bunch of guests coming through, taking phone calls, that kind of thing. It was the sort of thing that used to cost literally thousands of dollars. You had to get a radio link up to a hill and then fire that back to the studio...”